Random Thoughts
Once in a while I come up with a great idea for a new Top 5 List but simply cannot come up with the five ideas needed to round it out. It happens all the time. You can stop me at any given time and I will have four or five sheets of paper in my back pocket loaded with half filled out Top 5 Lists. I’ve been doing this for a long time and it is bordering on an obsession at this point.
So I figured I would take a few of those un-finished lists and put them together into one Random Thoughts piece. Just because I lack the creativity to round out the list of musicians who I wish would simply disappear into the next sunset and stop embarrassing themselves with new and horrible music is no reason to let James Taylor off the hook.
Musicians who need to go away –
You would be hard pressed to find a person who doesn’t like at least one James Taylor song. Even a head banging metal freak knows the words to Fire and Rain but the time has come for James to bring this act to a close. He wrote a song about a hundred years ago called Walking Man, he needs to be that guy now and walk.
James Taylor has not had a decent song in over twenty years and that’s being kind. Truthfully he hasn’t recorded a listenable piece of music since like 1980. That’s going on forty years and yet he continues to churn out album after album without any sense of self-respect. He has single handedly made himself completely irrelevant and destroyed what would have been a Herculean legacy of music.
At this point in his career James Taylor reminds me of my dad when we have a party. Two hours after the party is over my dad is asleep in the chair with zero intention of leaving. He simply has no concept of people wanting to go to bed. He’s 80 and really doesn’t have anything better to do which I think might be afflicting JT. I love my dad but it’s agonizing much like how James is now agonizing,
In addition, this bullshit bucolic act he puts on with the denim shirts and the leather hat coupled with this never ending stream of idiotic songs about blacksmithing and black licorice has made him into a clown. Nicki Minaj is regaling us with songs about her “anus” and James is still singing about railroad cars and picnics. Now I’m not going so far as to say that I appreciate the musical musing about one’s anus but I am saying that the world has passed moved on from poor James.
Is he broke? Is his wife a bitch and he needs to get out of the house? What?
Indian heat wave –
This is more of a current event rather than a part of a Top 5 List but if I were to assign it to an actual list, I would file it under the Top 5 Things I Don’t Understand.
Currently there is a killer heat wave going on in India with daily temperatures hitting 47 degrees Celsius.
Writers note:
I wondered just what 47 degrees Celsius equates to in the Fahrenheit scale since this whole metric system thing never really caught on and was told to simply multiply it by 5/9 or 9/5 then divide by something or other. WTF? I don’t remember how to do any of that shit so I just looked it up and found it to be somewhere in the 120 degree range. That’s pretty effing hot.
Sadly, some 1400 people have died. This is sad, no doubt but what flummoxes me is an article in the India Times, which I assume is a paper in, no surprise, India. First of all, the India Times? There are like over a billion people in India and they have one paper covering everything? The obituary section alone has got to be the size of the Manhattan phone book! What poor bastard has to deliver this daily tome? Anyway, the article said that the Indian government was mounting a crusade to inform the people suffering in this inhuman heat to stay in the shade and to wear light clothes.
Really? You have to tell people that it’s hotter in the sun and that they probably shouldn’t be wearing that wool overcoat when the thermometer bust into three digits? The weirdest part of the whole thing is that the death toll actually dropped the following week once this advice hit the streets further reinforcing my belief that at least half of the earth’s inhabitants IQ’s hover someplace near full blown idiot.
Shouldn’t the fact that you’re hot be enough to move into the shade? Profuse sweating is an indicator that maybe now isn’t the best time to be sporting that new North Face jacket no matter how awesome you may think you look in it. The need to maintain a non-lethal body temperature is innate in all of us, so I thought. I’m at a loss.
Pizza company desserts –
I was trying to assemble a Top 5 List of the companies who should have stuck with what made them good in the first place but was stymied at only one which kind of defeats the idea of a Top 5. Anywho, what is this obsession with stores like Papa John’s and Domino’s insisting on making desserts? I guess I know there is the never ending quest to find ways of increasing revenue but taking a pizza crust and coating it in cinnamon and icing does not constitute a dessert. Pizza crust is basically bread and when you add sugared toppings to bread, it’s called toast. I don’t want to pay to have toast delivered to my house and, frankly, I’m offended and pissed that he tried to slide this by me. Look blowhole, you have left over dough, suck it up and throw it away like everybody else does. Don’t dress up your garbage and sell it to us.
I made the unfortunate decision to purchase one of these atrocities a few months back from Papa John’s. It’s no secret that I am known to make bad food decisions when I am even remotely hungry so I don’t fault myself but, my God, this thing was just awful. It makes me hate their pizza which is why I say, stick to what made you good in the first place. You don’t see the people who make those Easter egg dying kits branching off into making missiles and land mines so what makes Papa think that we will welcome his pathetic desserts?
I think this went well. I got to use up some material that would be otherwise lost to my lack of creativity.
“Are you Alice menstruating?”
“What has that got to do with anything?!?!”
“Hey, back off man. I’m a scientist.”
JP Shaver Says.... 