Bad News Central

For years now, of my life’s goals has been to scuba dive at the Great Barrier Reef.  It may just have something to do with growing up in Alberta, the most bland, colourless, and featureless place on Earth, but pictures of the reef always made it look like the most beautiful place possible.

A few months ago, I finally made the trip.  Not to dwell on the negatives, but here’s approximately what it cost:

• Flight to Melbourne – $1500
• Flight to Cairns – $500
• Hotel in Cairns – $150
• Dive boat rental – $200
• Dive cost – $120

All told, it cost me close to $2500, and it was totally worth every penny.  The Great Barrier Reef really is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.  It not only lived up to my dreams, but surpassed them.  The diving instructor even took a picture of me holding a sea cucumber.  It was pretty much the greatest moment of my entire life.  I couldn’t wait to get the picture developed so I could frame it and hang it proudly on my wall.  I got home, got my pictures developed, and started leafing through them right in the store.  I had to see how that picture turned out.

It turned out like this:

It’s still going on the wall.

Share on Facebook

My Life is a Sitcom, Travel

I’m always on the lookout for weird things.  I’m a collector, and the crown jewel of my collection is a glass sculpture of the US Capitol Building labelled “White House”.  I bought it in souvenir shop in Anaheim.

Weird things just seem to gravitate towards me.  Take this CD, for example.  Me and a few friends were wandering downtown in the middle of the night, stoned out of our minds, when we wandered into a random convenience store for some munchies.  We got to the checkout, and while I was waiting for my friends to purchase their snacks, I started leafing through the CD display next to the cash register.  All of the CDs were of the new U2 album except for one – Slumdog Godzillionaire.  In my inebriated state of mind, those were the funniest two words I’d ever read.  They were the funniest two words possible.  I had to have it.  I gave it to the cashier, who gave it a puzzled look.  He’d never seen it before, he had no idea how it got there, or even how to ring it in since it didn’t have a price tag or a barcode.  He eventually rang it in as a U2 album (U2, you guys owe me $15).  As far as I can tell, this album doesn’t actually exist.  The track listing on the back is wrong, and some of the songs cut out halfway through.  I have no idea what the hell I bought.  Mizery even includes his phone number right in the CD booklet.  Going by the name, this will either be awesomely bad, or just bad bad.  Let’s have a look, track by track:

Then Till Now
Not a good start.  It’s not bad, just incredibly generic.  Every rap album seems to start off with a song that sounds like this. The song cuts out at a seemingly random point, and I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not.

Childhood’s End
Lovely, this one starts off with Mizery snorting a loogie.  Once the song starts it’s actually pretty damn good.  The lyrics are sweet, and the flow is nice.  Then the chorus comes in and totally fucks it up.  Good God the chorus is annoying.  Between this song and everything Eminem has put out in the last half decade, I think there needs to be a ban on rapping in “funny” accents.  I recommending starting this song right after the loogie and ending it right before the first chorus starts.  Or you could just skip it, but then you’d miss the 15 seconds of elevator music that kicks in at the end.  What a strange song.

The Haunting
Holy shit, this song kicks fucking ass!  The beat is intense, and the vocals are downright scary.  Seriously, this song is goddamned incredible!  It’s the only song so far to live up to the awesomeness of the album title, and then… the chorus comes in and ruins it again.  Good lord, he sounds exactly like Fred Durst.  Still, if you can get the image of Mr Durst out of your head, it’s a fantastic track.

The Predator, The Prey, The Serpent
This song is just completely backwards for this album – the verses are kind of generic, and then the chorus comes in and rocks the fuck out.  Some of the background music sounds like it was taken out of the Facility level of Goldeneye 64.  That’s the dorkiest thing I’ve ever written.

One Day
This song is exactly one minute long.  I can’t tell if it’s good or bad, because it ends before it has the chance to go anywhere.  I have no idea why this is on here.  My guess is he was exactly one minute short of filling the entire CD.

Emcees for Peace
This one’s a whopping 50% longer than the last song.  The end is pretty cool, and it doesn’t even take that long to get there!

The Clutch
Hey, this isn’t Clutch at all!  Again, it’s a pretty good track until the chorus kicks, and then it’s great.  Man, if he could only get a great verse and great chorus in the same song…

Trap Doors
Here we go, we’re back into awesomeness.  Not much to say about it, it’s just good song with some neat lyrics.

Love is Love
Another winner, this one’s catchy as hell.  He keeps dropping into the Fred Durst voice but aside from that it’s a pretty damn good song.  The woman singing on the chorus has a nice voice too.  Man, this album really turned around.  It’s too good to be a Bad News Central review, but what the hell, I’ve already written the intro and covered half the album.

The Saga Continues
Another good song that cuts out way too early.

Poverty Pimps
Crappy chorus, fucking rad verses.  We’re back where we started.  Fred Durst voice makes another appearance.

Prey at Knight
Fred Durst ballad.  Skip.

Unknown Misery
No, that’s not a mistake, this song title is his stage name, but spelled right.  The song itself is pretty damn good.  The whispering during the chorus is a nice touch.  Very catchy.

Staircase Memories
I really like this one.  Not quite as good as The Haunting, but the chorus is better.  This song proves that piano and rap go together like peanut butter and chocolate.  Can you name a piano-based rap song that sucks?  Me either.

Sunglasses
What in the holy fuck is this?  The song starts off with 30 seconds of babbling in a strange voice about wearing sunglasses, then an electric guitar kicks in and we get 15 seconds of him growling “I wear my sunglasses inside and in the dark” over and over again in his best punk voice.  Then the beat of “Sunglasses at Night” kicks in.  As if you couldn’t tell this song would sample that one just from the title.  Then he screams about preventing the reptiles from looking in his eyes.  What a weird song.  Once it actually gets going it’s fantastic.  Too bad the first 45 seconds are so annoying.  Still, it’s another good song, and not at all what I was expecting when I started this review.

Love is Love (remix)
It’s a remix of Love is Love, ie the song we just listened to a few minutes ago.  The first version was better.  This one has too much Fred Durst.

Change
Another weird song, but it sounds fucking cool.  I’ve never heard someone rap about YouTube before.  This one’s got some weird high-pitched background vocals and effect filters.  This is what you’d get if Danny Elfman wrote a rap song for a Tim Burton movie.  I love it.

Lucky Penny
This one alternates between whining/crying and growling/whispering.  Not my favourite, but not bad.

The Bitter Road
Another middle-of-the-road track.  I can’t even think of anything to say about it.  It’s okay. I like the piano at the end.

See Through
Ah, we’re back to the good stuff.  Damn, this is a cool track.  Great beat, cool vocals, all around awesome.

Revolt
Nice album closer.  Not much to say about, just a nice, mellow close to the album.

Rating: 4/5
It’s much more fun to tear something to pieces than to praise it, but this was a pretty damn good album.  Sorry.  It stumbles a bit out of the gate, but picks up quickly and rarely falters.  Not bad for a 21 track rap album.  The album highlight is The Haunting, which is the most kickass rap song I’ve heard in a long time.  Now I just need to find those three songs on the track list that aren’t actually on the album.

Oh, and get that refund from U2.

Share on Facebook

Music, Reviews

I didn’t learn to drive until my senior year of High School, so I usually had to take the bus to and from school.  I was quite shy back then, and mostly kept to myself.  The only time I would ever talk with somebody on the bus is if it was with someone I already knew.

One day in the middle of the trip home, a complete stranger stood up from his seat, walked up the isle, and plopped down in the seat beside me.  He was a schoolmate, but not one I’d ever talked to before.  He wasn’t in any of my classes, and he was probably the only person in the entire school shyer than me.  That’s why I was so surprised when, completely out of the blue, he handed me a wadded-up ball of magazine pages.

“Check out what I found under the seat!” he said, with an enormous shit-eating grin plastered across his face.  This was the first thing either of us had spoken to one another in our entire lives.  I unwadded the paper to reveal a good half-dozen pages ripped out of a porn magazine.  This was back in the day before high-speed internet, when you actually had to put effort into finding porn, or at least be willing to go dumpster diving behind the convenience store.  Stumbling randomly across porn would have been better than finding a lump of gold laying in the middle of the street, except that the person handing it to me was a total stranger.

We made small talk about the porn, with him more eager to talk about it than me.  I was just waiting for my stop so I could get the hell away from this freak.  My stop came, and I hopped off as quickly as possible.  I looked back and saw that my new friend had got off the bus too.  I was starting to go from awkward to nervous.  I walked in the direction of my house, with him tagging along, chatting endlessly about porn the entire way.  I was praying that he would stop at one of the driveways along the way, tell me that it was his house, and invite me inside.  Then I could decline, make up some excuse on having to be somewhere, and then get as far away as possible from this increasingly creepy schoolmate.

No such luck.  I walked up to my door, and he walked right up with me.  At no point had I ever invited him to my house, or even feigned interest in our conversation.  I opened the door and walked inside, and he walked right in behind me.  He didn’t ask, he just wandered in.  He just stood there talking about porn, occasionally looking at his crumpled-up magazine pages.  We stood there in the front hall for the longest two minutes of my life, when all of the sudden he asked if he could use the bathroom.  I felt relieved.  He just came in to use the bathroom!  It was weird that he just walked in without asking, but whatever, no harm done.  He went into the bathroom while I waited on the living room couch.  And waited.  And waited.  He was in there for a long time.  Finally, I heard the toilet flush, and he came out.

“Much better!” he said.  Then he grinned, winked, handed me the ball of porn, and walked out of my house.

I never saw him again.

Share on Facebook

My Life is a Sitcom

Google is determined to reinvent email with Google Wave; now you’ll be able to see someone type their email character-by-character.  That’s bad for people like me who constantly have to spellcheck their outbound messages for “thier”, “fro”, and “teh”.

This is even worse for interoffice communications.  Everyone’s written an angry email to their boss, and then didn’t send it for fear of losing their jobs.  Imagine the look on your boss’ face as he sees that message pop up letter by letter.

See you in the unemployment office.

Share on Facebook

News, Tech

From the May 1998 issue of Disney Adventures, here are profiles on the four hottest up-and-coming Boy Bands in the world:

Backstreet Boys

This is the only band on this list that I can remember actually existing.  Apparently these guys are still active as the Backstreet Boys, minus the guy in the middle with the creepy stare.  He was last seen in a movie with Haylie Duff, called Love Takes Wing, which is the 6th sequel to a Hallmark original, and was directed by Lou Diamond Phillips.  That’s pretty much a career black hole.

98 Degrees

These guys have been on “hiatus” since 2002, meaning that we’re going to be hearing from these guys again as soon as their solo careers hit the pavement.  Since then, one of them has gone on to marry Jessica Simpson (who, together, went on to make the most annoying program in television history), and two others have performed at Ralph Nader rallies (actual quote: “he is my hero!”)  Yeah, a reunion tour can’t be far off.

911

Who the fuck are these guys?  “Watch and see if they take America by storm.”  Yeah, no.  I’m guessing promo pics like the one above didn’t help their cause any.  Amazingly enough, these guys are still active in the UK, and with all original members.

No Authority

Alright, I’m pretty sure they’re just making up bands now.  I don’t remember ever hearing about them, and even Disney Adventures only awarded them 2/5 stars.  If you can’t even impress a magazine that exists solely to promote overly-commercial claptrap to children, you have a major problem.  Since breaking up in 2001, one member has gone on to do video game voice work, and the other three have dropped completely off the face of the Earth.

Bonus extra-creepy tidbit: they were signed by Michael Jackson.  That explains a lot.

Share on Facebook

Comics, Features