Check This Out: The Postal Service – “Nothing Better”
I’ve become a huge fan of The Postal Service lately. I heard them for the first time on my XM and picked up their CD the next day. My favorite song by far is “Nothing Better”. It’s a pretty catchy song that’s about a couple breaking up.
Breakup songs and songs about how much love bites (Def Leppard), love hurts (Nazareth), or love stinks (J. Geils Band) as a whole are a genre that’s been beaten to death over the years, but what makes this song different is that’s it’s about the breakup itself. It plays out like a fight between two lovers – one that’s in love and desperately wants to stay together and the other that wants to end things and move on.
As I said earlier, it’s incredibly catchy and really well written, but what really pushes it over the top for me is how it totally nails the “fight” dialogue – like the way the dude will do anything to keep the girl and just refuses to accept that it’s over. In his head, he’s already thought out their whole life and can imagine them being happy growing old together, but he’s being unrealistic. The girl for her part is trying to get his head out of the clouds and get him to see that it’s not working, but he won’t hear it, leading to my favorite line in the song:
Don’t you feed me lines about some idealistic future
Your heart won’t heal right if you keep tearing out the sutures
We’ve all been there — I was there just a few months ago. Maybe that’s why this song strikes such a chord with me. Anyway, check this out:
The Triumphant Return of Goldenwing
On a random Thursday night in November of 2001, ABC aired the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show in its prime-time lineup. The sight of dozens of beautiful women strutting their stuff in high heels and skivvies prompted strong and mixed reactions in the media, with some praising it as a brave, democratic demonstration in a fragile post-9/11 New York and others calling it mainstream pornography and a corruption of our nation's values. For my 4 Boston housemates and I, it was one of the greatest things to grace our 53-inch television. Fortunately, one of my housemates had the foresight to pop in a blank tape as the program began.
Tragically, the tape has since passed into abyss, along with many other relics from our once proud bachelor pad, and we have been left only with memories of the decadent display of the 25 most famous models of the day showing their A-game: Gisele in her prime, Heidi Klum before she gave birth to a baby Seal, Adriana Lima when she was still a relative unknown, Tyra Banks before she became a psychotic, self-obsessed talk show host, and numerous other anatomically improbable figures.
Fortunately, the internet has grown in power and splendor over the past five years and YouTube is here to help, offering up the final eight minutes of the program with our panty-garbed heroes frolicking in wings to the tune of a totally kickass gospel cover of "Let the Sun Shine In". Enjoy.
“The A-poon-tice”
This past weekend, I was hanging out with a friend who through some dumb luck and good fortune attended a party at the Playboy Mansion awhile back. He described a place not much different than my "happy place", where incredibly attractive women mingled with and outnumbered average-looking douchebags and every building and room was seemingly designed solely for the purpose of seduction and hangin' out in flagrante delicto.
Obviously, we're all familiar with the famous grotto, but apparently there's also a stone "outhouse" full of bathrooms, though not the kind you might find at a campground or county fair. Instead, this one contains multiple "stalls" — each one equipped with a two-headed shower, a daybed, vanity/sink, and, of course, a toilet (rumors of the love toilet's presence have not been confirmed). There is also a "game room" building equipped with pool tables, tvs, and multiple arcade games, but its real offering is multiple private TV rooms. Each of these TV rooms is smallish — measuring roughly 10 x 10 — and has a huge flatscreen on the wall. The floor of the room is covered in pillows of assorted shapes and sizes. This, in itself, isn't that remarkable… until you step down into the room and realize that the entire floor is one giant mattress and the ceiling is one giant mirror — sort of like a hybrid moonwalk/home entertainment system designed for "the bangin'". Oh yeah — and they have a zoo with a bunch of monkeys. One of them is probably even named "Captain Jumpy Ninja" or something rad like that.
Anyway, this got me thinking. Hugh Hefner has arguably the most kickass life of any American male. He's worth millions, has multiple hot blonde girlfriends, and lives in one of the most amazing houses ever — the Playboy Mansion is to corn-fed heterosexuals what the Neverland Ranch is to pedophiles. The only problem is, Hef is getting OLD — like fossil old. He founded the magazine some 53 years ago, which by my rough calculations makes him only slightly younger than Benjamin Franklin would be were he still alive today, not to mention the fact that he's gone from a James Bond clone to looking like a piece of chewed up Bubblicious. Observe:
At some point, the man is going to have to pass on the reigns. He's spent a lifetime building his mystique and it would be a shame to see it go to waste. That's why I think he needs to hold a competition similar to Donald Trump's "The Apprentice". Think about it — they made a top-rated TV show out of the idea that some folks would like to follow in the footsteps of a cheesedick with circus-bad hair and a doofy inflection. Surely Hef could start a revolution by doing the same with his empire.
Now I understand that the man has children of his own including several male heirs, but simply handing things over to them would be boring. Besides, they've already had a lifetime of hanging out at the mansion with beautiful naked women and monkeys. I say, step aside and let a worthy successor emerge. How would you decide who's worthy? Why through a series of ingenious trials and tasks, of course.
For example, you might have a contest to see who could walk into a crowd of total strangers and convince a beautiful 19-year-old woman whose turnoffs include "cold weather and bad breath" to writhe around a faux apple orchard in her birthday suit for a photo shoot. Or date three woman at once without at least one of them crying hysterically on a daily basis, boiling your pet rabbit, or attacking your Johnson with hedge clippers. Or take an ordinary room and turn it into a "happy place" of equal parts grade-school birthday party and romantic getaway (like the bangin' Moonwalk). Perhaps its even as simple as seeing if any of the contestants look darn good wearing a velvet robe and smoking a pipe.
What's more, you could even charge an entry fee and raise roughly a kabillion dollars. Think about it — multiple jackasses have spent as much as $20 million to go into outer space. If I had the choice between doing the astronaut thing or walking a mile in Hef's shoes, I know which one I'd choose — and I doubt I'm alone. How much would you pay? $1000? $1 million? With enough dudes ponying up for the chance at the title, you could raise enough money to build another bigger, better, even more rad mansion — with 10 times the monkeys! Hell — you could probably buy an island and start your own sovereign state dedicated to advancing the cause of single men and busty stripper pirates everywhere. I know I'd want to live there.
