Quote of the year: “It’s offensive to me and my family. I have a 17-year-old daughter. I have school buses that come by, and we have to look at this artwork that wouldn’t be seen on the cover of a magazine in Wal-Mart.”
Fifty percent of Barber College employees find the music of Bob Seger pedestrian and boring. Can you guess which half?
(Note: One hundred percent of Barber College employees were born and raised in Michigan and attended school in Ann Arbor.)
Couldn’t agree more, tommy-gun-toting condiment Lincoln.
We’d be remiss in bloggite duties (already dangerously close to losing our license), if we didn’t point out that despite a couple nice personal victories, the past year pretty much reeked of ass.
That includes wars, baseball and the general performance of this blog.
Oh sure there was the odd Hold Steady album/marriage to pull us through, but we’re lazy generalist at heart so we have to cross our arms and badmouth another year. Our scheduled BC summit on the first got delayed by a couple of badly-considered bottled Napa Valley exports. I’d sigh, but it was this ner-do-well sloppiness that carried our forefathers to glory.
So we’ll press on without a formal playbook and with an ever slipping-grasp of what people enjoy reading about. Sometimes I think we’re getting too mean-spirited, but then again I’m the wuss who didn’t want to kill-off any characters in the spring play back in high school. I sometimes wonder what I worried about. Anyways, bad taste isn’t a crime, though I sometimes wonder if it should be.
If a newspaper is a country conversing with itself, than a blog a minor principality drunk dialing itself in the wee, small hours. Wait did I say that before? Did I read it somewhere else? What the hell does it take to have an original effing idea these days? Don’t bother googling it, I don’t want to know (If this comes off grumpy by the way, it’s cause my furnace wasn’t working when I got home last night so I woke up cold and cold I seem to have stayed all day).
Joel emailed me this morning to ask what I thought we should be writing about these days, but I’m still working out what to say. The comforts of rock music, literature and ice cream seem to be fading, Big Little Buddy. Sometimes you have to get all Garfield on a Monday afternoon and wonder if you’re ready to move on to Tuesday. But I like Tuesdays. It’s my favorite day of the week. Somebody has to like it best. God knows I’m plenty busy putting off starting my novel and disliking my job, but I’ll take one for the team.
So all hands on deck. There are plenty of fresh graves to piss on and heaps of shit yet to talk. BC in ’07. A Year of Magic.
Disclaimer: If you’ve ever read this blog or talked to me for more than five seconds, you probably know that nothing is sacred to me, so this might be pretty goddamn offensive to some of you.
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So I was out all night with my friend Eric yesterday, and I ended up crashing at his place in East Hills, just outside of Grand Rapids. We got up around noon and went to Wolfgang’s, a diner on Lake Drive in Eastown. Around 12:30 people were lining up along Lake, and we realized the the dead prez was gonna be rolling through soon! Roads were closed, city and military police were out in force. So we did what anyone in our situation would do: We watched the procession and made snide comments.
Some things that actually came out of my mouth during the procession:
“This is the worst parade I’ve ever seen.”
“Why did he have to die in the winter? It’s fucking cold.”
“Why did he have to die the day after James Brown and totally steal JB’s thunder? James Brown did so much more for this country. He invented three of the greatest genres ever.”
“This is probably the only time a president can ride in a parade without having to worry about snipers.” (Re: People sitting on a rooftop across the street)
“Betty Ford looks like shit.”
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Here are some pictures. You can blame the quality on Eric, because I was busy manning the vid.
I’ll whip up a little video tribute to GR’s favorite son as soon as my battery finishes charging. In honor of Gerald Ford’s football-playing days at the U, it will feature music by Ann Arbor’s own MC5. He would have wanted it that way.
