Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Guinness inspires losers, Nebraska football bottoms out and Steve Albini obliterates Prince the poseur


- Guinness, you’ve successfully inspired another no-life-having loser to accomplish a feat of worthlessness that the world can never fully unknow. The latest loser to carve out a niche of ignominy for himself is Canby, Oregon native Toby Johnson, who is hopeful that the monument to ridiculousness that he has constructed in his yard will soon be certified as the world's largest nutcracker. Scanning the landscape of society, Johnson sat back and wondered why no one had wasted the time, money, effort and personal dignity necessary to build a nutcracker larger than the 33-foot, 1-inch record-holder in Germany. He set out to break that record and to listen to this tool, it was an inspired effort that was going to take him to the top of the mountain if it killed him. "It's a challenge," Johnson said. "Anyone can carve a bear, and this is something that I thought, yeah, I'm going to have to do that. We're actually planning on every year, every other year, trying to break another record. “ Wonderful, T-Sizzle. According to Johnson, builders from several companies contributed to the project and they are still waiting for the Guinness Book of World Records to confirm the record.  Record or not, the nutcracker will be shown off at the Festival of Lights in Roseburg starting Sunday. It is large enough to both crack a coconut and to sufficiently embarrass every member of Johnson’s extended family and his entire town in the process and that’s when a man knows he has accomplished something truly dubious and pointless……..


- Pope Frank is at it again.  If he isn't washing the feet of the poor, he’s having his henchmen install showers inside the Vatican for homeless people to use to clean themselves up on a daily basis and if he’s not installing showers, then he’s spitting in the faces of people who have kindly bestowed upon him amazing and luxurious gifts by pawning those gifts away. Yes, Pope Francis is raffling off dozens of gifts he's been given during his short papacy, including a new Fiat 4x4, some badass bicycles and even a top-end coffee maker, all in the name of charity. The big guy in the Catholic Church will donate all money from the raffle to charity and maybe the best part of the story is the pope have his own street team, a.k.a. the Vatican City State administration, put up posters around the Vatican advertising the 10 euro ($13) per ticket raffle like it was a fundraiser for their youth football team as it hosts the neighbors for a spaghetti dinner so it can buy new uniforms. For those who want in, tickets are on sale at the Vatican post office, pharmacy and other venues open to the public. The raffle is just firing up and the winners won't be announced until Jan. 8, so there is plenty of time to get on board. The pope has carved out a solid reputation for himself as a man of simplicity and in that spirit, he has overhauled the Vatican's finances to make them more efficient and to devote more money to charity. Owning an unofficial Popemobile or a high-end Schwinn that the pontiff didn’t have use for does have a certain kitsch to it, so maybe this raffle is a solid idea after all………. 


- Steve Albini has finally done it. Everyone has a point in life where they summit the mountain, where their hard work pays off and they record the single greatest accomplishment of their life. For Albini, that moment came during his keynote speech at the Face The Music conference in Melbourne, Australia. Much of his talk was pointless and rambling, including an extended rant on music streaming services such as Spotify. "Music has entered the environment as an atmospheric element, like the wind, and in that capacity should not be subject to control and compensation,” Albini postulated. “Well, not unless the rights holders are willing to let me turn the tables on it. If you think my listening is worth something, OK then, so do I. Play a Phil Collins song while I’m grocery shopping? Pay me $20. Def Leppard? Make it $100. Miley Cyrus? They don’t print money big enough." He later paid tribute to the late BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, saying: "He listened religiously to every single record he received in the mail, devoting hours of every day to the task. I sent him a copy of the first album I ever made and not only did he play the record on air, he sent me back a postcard with a personal remembrance of Chicago, of visiting a matron aunt as a child in Evanston, the suburb where my post office box was kept. I treasured that note as the first indication that John Peel was a great man." But the best moment of the speech and the best moment of his life came when he denounced the wildly overrated and overhyped Prince as a “purple dwarf in assless chaps.” He even dragged small children into the diatribe. “If your little daughter does a kooky dance to a Prince song don’t bother putting it on YouTube for her grandparents to see or a purple dwarf in assless chaps will put an injunction on you,” Albini said. “Did I offend the little guy? F*ck it. His music is poison." Well said, Steve-O………


- Bo Pelini is clearly a visionary because he’s seeing things that no one else is seeing. The head football coach at Nebraska watched his team get b*tch-slapped 59-24 by Wisconsin on Saturday and allow an NCAA-record 408 yards rushing to the Badgers’ Melvin Gordon in the process, a loss that all but ended the Huskers’ hopes of playing in the Big Ten title game. Yet even with a few days to reflect on that loss, which dropped his career record at Nebraska to 66-26, Pelini has a much sunnier view of his program than Nebraska fans, boosters and damn near everyone else who watched that dumpster fire. Pelini said he had nothing to apologize for and that his program has not hit a ceiling in his seventh year on the job. “We've won a lot of football games since I've been here. A lot of programs across the country would have died to have won the amount of football games we've won,” Pelini said. Maybe Nebraska fans do unrealistically expect the success and national dominance of a bygone era in which Tom Osborne won national championships and racked up No. 1 rankings like a Girl Scout accrues badges, but staying within four touchdowns of a conference rival shouldn’t be too much to ask. It also shouldn’t be asking too much that Nebraska not lose seven games by 17 points or more in four years, which the Huskers have done under Pelini. Amazingly, no other ranked team has lost so many games by so lopsidedly over that span, so the people of the corn stand alone there. ''Since I've been head football coach, we've been very consistent,'' Pelini said. ''I'm not looking here to defend our program or where we are right now. What I came here to do was win a conference championship and win a national championship, and we're going to keep fighting tooth and nail to get that done.'' Right, but you seem to be getting further away from that goal each year, not closer, and they’re paying you $3.1 million annually to do so………

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