FilteringCraig

I am happy to report that one of the most overrated bands in the history of music is breaking up. Trey Anastasio, the man who was almost responsible for ruining Primus by distracting Les Claypool with his highly talented form of boring rock and roll, has announced that Phish will be breaking up following their next tour. The band has one more album (that probably sounds like all their others) coming out on June 15th called Undermind. The band will tour in support of that album, further bleeding a fanbase that is too high on drugs to know any better.

While the majority of the music loving public is celebrating today, there are a few “victims.” Makers of patchouli are said to be mourning the loss, along with all the people who would braid Phish fans’ hair in trade for drugs, Volkswagen bus owners, acid dealers and of course pot paraphernalia merchants. This might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for these folks. They might have to get jobs, move out of their parents’ basements and listen to something other than the 2.7 million taped Phish concerts they have collected over the years, despite not having large variations in the set list from night to night.

Well, I bid Phish good riddance. And good luck Phish fans.

(If this article pisses you off then we are laughing at you instead of with you. Think about it.)

In honor of my friend’s insanity, I am joining a fight for something which I honestly do not understand. Given the pitch and timbre of his yelling, I have no choice but to stand shoulder to shoulder in his time of need. Deezo Feezo, insane childhood friend and frequent insane contributor here at Filtering Craig, would like to stop the return of a mascot named Geauga Dog now that Six Flags Amusement Park in lovely Aurora Ohio has been turned back into Geauga Lake. I know it is difficult to follow, but all I can say is that for whatever reason (I still do not know) we need to stop the return of Geauga Dog.

It is going to be a tough battle, but according to Deezo, it is one worth fighting. At the present (Tuesday May 25th at 7:14 A.M.) the voting has already begun over at GeaugaLake.com in the lower left-hand corner and people want the return of Geauga Dog 86.6% to 13.4% who apparently account for Deezo’s friends and family who are willing to humor his “nutty as a fruitcake-ness.”

So, even if you don’t understand it, please click over to GeaugaLake.com and cast a vote against the return of Geauga Dog. If you feel compelled to fight this fight on your own website (I have no idea why any of you want to read this let alone put something up on your own websites) please feel free to link back to here and show your solidarity in this important (not really that important at all) fight against an amusement park mascot.

UPDATE

(this pic was provided by deezo, proving his incomparable insanity.)

I know a lot of people including Mister Crunchy, The official Filtering Craig Secretary of Revenge, and Jarataur have expressed their displeasure with those horrible movies that George Lucas has done to create the precursor to the Star Wars Series. I tend to agree that these movies have been a big time disappointment.

Now, this article makes a play about how the third movie can be saved.

This is hilarious. Suggestions include luring George Lucas off of the set and knocking him out, (Can I suggest a sock full of quarters?) as well as firing Hayden Christiansen.

If you send me your CD for a review on RockDummy.com and then you don’t see it show up, be careful what you ask for. If you email me and pester me to review your CD because you are just SURE you are going to want to link it when I am done reviewing the greatest piece of music that you ever wrote, you are really setting yourself up for disappointment.

Be Careful What You Wish For. You Just Might Get It.

You can do anything you want for the most part. It is a friendly border. You can send us Mike Meyers, Dan Akyroyd, Jim Carrey, The Barenaked Ladies and Pam Anderson. I guess we will even put up with Celine Dion, Dave Coulier, Anne Murray, and Shania Twain. We won’t complain (much.)

But this is going too far. If we can handle you sending us Celine Dion and Dave Coulier, then you will just have to calm down about our frozen, rising crust pizza.

OTTAWA, Ontario (Reuters) — Over the past few years Canada and the United States have argued about bilateral trade in such high-profile commodities as wheat, softwood lumber, cattle and hogs. Now it’s frozen self-rising pizza.

Ottawa said on Monday it would slap provisional anti-dumping duties of 39.4 percent on imports of frozen self-rising pizzas made in, or exported from, the United States.

The duties — imposed after a complaint by private Canadian firm McCain Foods — will affect pizzas such as the “Delissio” brand made by U.S. food giant Kraft.

Canada’s Border Services Agency, which imposed the temporary measure, said in a statement it would decide on Aug. 16 this year whether to make the penalty permanent.

Countries apply anti-dumping duties when they deem that goods are being sold at less than the selling prices in the exporter’s domestic market or at unprofitable prices.

As I was listening to Baron Von Bullshit Rides Again, which is a Modest Mouse live album, I heard the funniest Freebird exchange ever.
The fan yells “Play some Freebird!” like the ass-hat that he is, and Isaac Brock, lead singer of Modest Mouse responds with the following.

“I know I have said this before, but the odds of us actually playing Freebird?

There are no odds. It is not going to happen.

I will start off with the first reason. We have no idea how to play Freebird.

The second reason is. In the Love Bug’s natural habitat, that would f***ing kill him and you wouldn’t want that. He is f***ing adorable. He is cute.

Thirdly, even if, pick your deity, came down from the heavens or wherever or the hills or wherever the deity lives and blessed us with this vast knowledge of Freebird. And we could play it backwards and sing it backwards.

We still just wouldn’t do it.

(pause)

If this were the Make A Wish Foundation and you were going to die in 20 minutes just long enough to play Freebird, we still wouldn’t play it.

Here is the end reason. The end reason is that life is just too f***ing short to hear or play Freebird.”

(First posted at RockDummy.com)

I know a lot of you have probably seen pictures, or the video of Nick Berg from Pennsylvania, being beheaded in Iraq. I have now seen this video.

I don’t have any politics to spew afterward. All I can express is my horror and deep sadness at what I saw. I can’t tell you when the last time I cried was, but today after seeing something this shocking and horrible video, crying was the only thing that I could do. I am not instantly angry over it because I might still be in a state of shocked disbelief and I can’t describe it any further, for fear of breaking up again.

It’s like these terrorists aren’t real people. They are just abstract figures that are so complex that I can’t figure them out. People will call their brutality simplistic, but if I can’t understand it, I refuse to think it is anything simple. I have never truly been motivated to take somebody’s life. Never. Sure I say things like that hyperbolically. I think everyone does. The fact is that no matter how angry I have ever been in my lifetime, I have never felt myself capable of actually taking anybody’s life as a pre-meditated means to fuel the anger and rage within. These guys did it to make a point. They did it as a result of their constant hatred for me and all the people in the world like me who have this one thing in common; The country we were born. That’s all I can come up with.

I don’t have any worldly conclusions about how this does or does not justify anything we do or have done. I just can’t bring it back to reality long enough to apply it elsewhere. If that changes anytime soon, I will let you know. But for now, I will just say that I have never in my lifetime ever seen anything as horrible as that, nor do I think I know anyone who would ever be capable of doing that to another person.

Today I am taking a day off from reviewing music. Normally I would spend the day listening to CD’s while I work and then when I get home at night, I would review them. Since I have been doing this reviewing thing, I have noticed that listening to music has become a chore of annoying proportions a lot of the time. As many of you know, I am a HUGE music fan. Some have even called me insane.

When I find a CD I like, I can sit there with it playing in the background on repeat for an entire day while I work. I did that with the most recent Iron and Wine CD. I have done it with other CD’s like Coheed and Cambria, The Beautiful Mistake, Chop Suey!!! by System of a Down, The Weak’s End by Emery and many many more. There is one song on the Emery CD that I have listened to 55 times, by Winamp’s count. That doesn’t even count the number of times I listened to it at home. If you are interested, the song is called, “By All Accounts (Today was a disaster.)” It is a powerful song.

So the problem is that these CD’s that I have sitting here waiting to be reviewed have a very good chance of sucking. If you look at the math, you will realize that the majority of the music out there isn’t to your liking. I own well over 1000 cd’s now and I like almost all of them. I am sure there are some that I should sell somewhere and I wouldn’t miss them. But then if you look at all the releases every year and realize that I own such a small percentage of them, it becomes ridiculous.

So now I have all these CD’s being sent to me that I may or may not like. Chances are that they will be outside of my tastes because I didn’t pick them myself. I think when I write reviews of them I can be objective and not blast something because it isn’t my taste. I think I could take the next Dixie Chicks album and do a reasonable review of it. I would rate it on hit quality, and variation from past releases and things like that. Even if it deserves a good review, the chances are probable that I don’t like it.

As you can see, the system is in place where I won’t be able to enjoy music anymore. I will be too busy listening to assignment types of CD’s and not taking time to enjoy the CD’s that grab my attention and need to be repeated for an entire day on Winamp.

I took today off. I have listened to Emery, Hall and Oates, Iron and Wine, Ben Gibbard, Interpol, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Chauncey, American Analog Set and The Canterbury Effect. Next up is Minus the Bear. The reviews will have to wait so I can be a fan today.

This first appeared at RockDummy.com

Sometimes you see things that are just so out of place that it messes with your head. For example if you ever go to a strip club with your boys and you see a stripper that you know from somewhere. And then you realize that you went to school with the person before the breast implants. When you think of this, I am sure a lot of you think immediately to Varsity Blues where James Van Der Beek and his football buddies go out the night before a game and the whole “hot for teacher” thing plays out perfectly. Their teacher is a stripper at the club and after a much too short second of embarrassment she is down with dancing for all her students at some shady bar in the middle of the country.

Well, it just doesn’t always work like that, for those are the movies. I had this feeling last night that something just wasn’t right when I was watching the Sopranos. I had been feeling uneasy for the last few weeks and I couldn’t quite place my finger on it. Then last night there was a scene where a couple of thugs from Tony’s crew took a security guard from the docks and smashed his legs with his own security baton. Here they are smashing the hell out of this guy with the baton and taunting him. The camera closes in on this guy who is doing the most smashing and it hits me. I know that dude, and I start laughing.

None other than Vinnie Delpino is smashing the legs of this guy. The actor’s name is Max Casella. Still not ringing any bells? Vinnie was the feeble sidekick for Doogie Housser MD on that show that I watched when I was a kid. You know Neal Patrick Harris plays a super smart kid who becomes a doctor at a very young age. Vinnie is his best friend and he is on again and off again with his young sweetheart Wanda. He types in his life lessons every week in his computer journal with that crazy music playing in the background. It’s like a more serious version of Mr. Belvedere.

So, Vinnie Delpino is smashing this guy’s legs as a cast member in the Sopranos. Nobody has ever been so long forgotten and reappeared out of nowhere. Well, other than this one guy.

Does anyone know the name Mark Holton? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Before you all run to the Internet Movie Database, I am going to tell you. This guy is the star of the 2003 movie Gacy which takes you through the life and times of one of the more notorious serial killers in this country’s history. John Wayne Gacy terrorized suburban Chicago for years killing people and burying them under his house. In his spare time he dressed as Pogo the clown and entertained kids. Anyway, John Gacy was portrayed by Mark Holton, who happened to play Francis Buxton back in 1985. Francis Buxton was the guy who Stole Pee Wee Herman’s bicycle in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

Oh, and in case you thought Mark Holton was a one-hit wonder, he also played the fat basketball player who made a shot with his eyes closed in Teen Wolf. You know, Chub? Anyway, watching him dig shallow graves and cover them with lime in the space underneath his house was just too much of a displacement. Just like Vinnie from Doogie Houser cracking every bone in a man’s leg with a security baton.

Anyway, I hope I get some more warning before I have to see any more displacements like that. I mean, next thing you know I will have to see Boner from Growing Pains. (How funny is it that there was a character named Boner on a show called Growing Pains?) So, Boner from Growing Pains will be in some movie starring Woopie Goldberg and Eric from Head of the Class. That might be too much to take.