Saturday, December 22, 2007

Awesome Sandwich Awesome Again

Adam and Teresa are in. Danny Bonaduce is out.

Oh, glory days.

My manifesto has received quite the attention over the past few days since Rob Barnett, former President of CBS Radio, linked my harangue about Danny Bonaduce being the shit in my awesome Carolla sandwich in his blog "The Night Feed." This is awesome (a) because Rob Barnett is the man who had the vision to bring Adam Carolla to morning radio and (b) because he detests Jack Silver, the current program director, Pig Vomit #2, and a single-celled organism with the name of a bad pirate villain from a TV-movie.

Yarrr.

Below is a link to Mr. Barnett's blog as well as a snippet from the LARadio.com press release on the wonderful news all Carolla fans received this week.

http://blog.mydamnchannel.com/

(from LARadio.com press release): Barnett believes that Silver isn’t taking advantage of the potential controversy over the Carolla no-show. “Old Jack Silver completely missed the lessons he should have learned from Stern,” Barnett offered yesterday. “Instead of inviting controversy as an honest and essential friend of true talk radio – AND great for ratings plus his bonus checks – he goes pussy and takes the message boards down to avoid any harsh critique – whotta shame plus what an indictment on the fact that he DOESN'T GET IT.”

He called Silver a pussy. I love it. Let Old Jack continue to plunder the airwaves with such nonsense as the Tom Leykis show -- a call-in show for Los Angeles' intellectually hopeless -- and the new "Bonaduce Hour," a 2-3 PM slot sure to be listened to by the 47 people who showed up to see him at "Christmas Carolla" this year when Adam was a no-show.

That hour-long trainwreck will be a "must listen" for the morbidly curious. Which I'm sure will drive the ratings, which I'm sure will shiver Jack Silver's timbers.

Regardless, Bonaduce's out and my awesome sandwich is going to taste awesome again starting January 2, 2008 at 6AM. See you there.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Crossover or crossdresser?

Hey, you in the Nissan Murano. I know you think you're cooler than the guy in the lane next to you driving the Dodge Caravan minivan with thirty kids staining the seats with their Yoo-Hoo squeezeboxes and other, more unmentionable things while putting enough fingerprints on the windows to give David Caruso a CSIgasm...

But I have some unfortunate news for you--you're not.

The "crossover" is one of the greatest marketing myths ever to be perpetrated on the American consumer. Yeah, you went ahead and crapped out 4 kids in 6 years and now your wife made you trade in that cool coupe you really liked so you could get a "family car."

What that really means is that your wife told you to buy a minivan.

The minivan is castration via automobile. Women who make their husbands get minivans are the same women who dress their husbands (in the same sweaters that got kids--ironically, probably these exact guys--beat up in middle school) and talk to them like they're live-in help in Orange County.

Real men don't drive minivans. Real men don't let their wives buy minvans.

When you purchase a minivan, you may as well just take your nuts out, slice 'em off with a Wustoff and stick 'em in vinegar. They're pickled and you're done as a man.

And these "crossovers" are just as bad. And don't you dare call your Nissan Murano or Ford Edge a truck. Trucks run shit over and pull things behind them, they aren't loaded to the brim with colorful beach toys and 30 kids hopped up on Yoo-Hoo and SpongeBob.

A crossover is a minivan with slightly bigger wheels. Take a good, long look and tell me I'm not right. In fact, crossovers might actually be worse! What's worse when you're a dude out chick shopping? When you run into a gay guy that you know is gay and it's cool, but you'd also never take him home?

Or when you run into a transsexual who looks like a chick? See, this one is attractive from a distance but you take her home and you realize she has big wheels -- I mean a cock.

And any man who disagrees with these thoughts clearly owns a minivan (crossover) or is going shopping for one over the Christmas break.

That's right, I said Christmas, you cowards. Christmas--you know--December 25th? The day Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ?

But alas, that unbridled harangue must be saved for another day.

The point of this one is, you own the keys to a minivan or a "crossover," you traded your balls, testosterone and self-respect as a man to get one.

Congratulations, pussy.

Emo Kids

I can't attribute this to my own brain, but it's good stuff anyway.

Q: How many Emo kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Let 'em cry in the dark.

God, I hate Emo kids.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Fat Stewardesses

I'm sorry -- I mean fat flight attendants. Wouldn't want to offend any gay steward (who are actually quite fit in most cases) by insinuating that he's chosen a woman's career.

By the way, "stewardesses" is the longest word you can type with one hand on the keyboard. Seriously. And this factoid comes from a guy who's done a lot of one-handed typing...

But I digress.

I fly cross country a lot for work. I've clocked nearly 35,000 miles this year alone. I always sit in the aisle because that's where I feel least claustrophobic while sitting on an aeroplane. I know it's no longer "legal" to require employees to achieve certain size and weight standards, but it's getting downright fucking dangerous to ride in the aisle seat of most commercial airlines. The average airline aisle width is approximately 30 inches. The average stewardess' (sorry, flight attendant) ass is 34 inches.

Do the math, people.

I have been jarred out of an engaging book, a GQ article on what kind of cologne I should wear based on my skin's complexion, or a restless nap on the prisoner transport vehicles that pass as passenger jets countless times when one of these swaggering wide-loads comes barrelling down the aisle to remind me that an iPod cannot be in the "on" position during takeoff --

-- Why? They can't supply a reason. They can't tell me why my iPod might undesireably interact with cockpit instruments. Believe me, folks, if an iPod can fuck with the altimeter in a Boeing 757, we have much bigger problems than me listening to Kenna to suppress my urge to kill while on a cross-country flight.

I also love when they tell me to turn the switch off on my iPod. The switch. On my iPod. Which tells me that not only are they completely disconnected with their gym membership, but so, too, are they with commonly available consumer technology.

Final thought: Hey, fatass. If your skill set consists of wearing plastic wings and serving half-cans of Coke (why don't they give you the full can?) while looking for the off switches on iPods, I'd like to let you know that you don't have much to differentiate yourself from competing job applicants. Hop on a treadmill and dial down the Iced Macchiatos, sweetheart. I'm getting tired of getting blasted with Scott Stevens body-checks from your 50 pound caboose while flying on your already-uncomfortable-enough airplane.

Friday, December 14, 2007

The Shit in My Awesome Sandwich

When I worked in Jersey, I used to go to a particular deli that made a sandwich that had no name. I think it was a #3 or something. It was a hoagie with breaded chicken cutlets, balsamic vinegar, roasted peppers and fresh mozzarella. It was awesome. Eating that sandwich turned down the noise on all the asinine things that I was subjected to in office life. That sandwich was a blissful little place I could go to get out of the office and get a guaranteed awesome sandwich.

That's why I named it the "Awesome Sandwich." I'm so clever it hurts.

Those of us who are herded into offices counter-intuitively to our species each day often have to seek a way to dull the pain of being there. I do so with talk radio. My all-time favorite radio show is a little gem I discovered when I first moved to Los Angeles 18 months ago called The Adam Carolla Show. Adam is hilarious. He's become somewhat of an inspiration of mine. I won't take up time and space here with empty idolatry (remember, I promised everything in my manifesto would have a point). Suffice it to say that every morning from 6-10, Adam has been my Awesome Sandwich.

In January of 2007, a full year ago, Jack Silver -- Howard Stern's "pig vomit" of LA Radio -- decided that morning radio that was intelligent, unique, humorous and not bitter and cruel (see: Opie & Anthony) was incomplete without a has-been humorless hack from bad 1970s television.

Enter: Danny Bonaduce.

Danny Bonaduce is the shit in my awesome sandwich. I've been tolerating him for over a year now, trying to eat around his shit to get to the balsamic-drenched poultry zest of Adam Carolla and creamy mozzarella deliciousness of the beautiful Teresa Strasser.

I challenge you all to listen to one podcast and tell me that you don't want to choke the life out of this demon midget.

Apparently, Adam has had enough of the shit in his personal swimming pool. After 10 years worth of radio and TV rants about people that call in sick due to their "biorhythms" and just being "weak pusses," he called in sick 3 days in a row to his own radio show. He missed his own year-end live broadcast party last night called the "Christmas Carolla." It's clearly a walkout. He's had enough of being stepped on, low-browed, one-upped and talked over by that cancer-throated ass boil Danny Bonaduce.

The ratings went up with the edition of the carcinoma leprechaun this year, folks.

And trust me, this is not good radio.

But this is the problem, isn't it? The intelligent, truly artistic endeavors die (see: Arrested Development) while bland stupidity thrives (see: anything on CBS). We're idiots. That's the problem. And the media has to pander to us because we're too lazy to care or too dumb to figure it all out. Regardless, we're headed down a dangerous road of muted themes and pointless patter, aren't we? Do you ever flip on TV and wonder what this will all look like in 10 years after it's had a chance to get worse? Is reality TV a subversive government program aimed at making us slobbering fools with no ability to become intellectually engaged anymore?

That's why Danny Bonaduce is the shit in my awesome sandwich. And now I need to throw it out and go back to work hungry.

Mission Statement

The word "blog" has become yet another beaten-to-death pop culture cliche that, ironically, will be one of the many "unbridled harangues" I unleash onto the internets through the course of this catharsis. I call this endeavor "catharsis" because I'm not doing this for you, the reader. If you gain something positive from this online manifesto, then good show. That would be a positive shift from the absolute media pornography we're all subjected to on a daily basis.

And I don't mean the good kind with the boobs and such. I mean the kind that makes us dumber. The kind where we are actually hypnotized by the notion of what zero-value-added vapid succubi like Paris Hilton will do next.

No, I'm doing this for me. Someone who has become sickened by his own hyper-awareness of the absurdity of our species and culture. Someone who likes to count himself among the "intellectually curious." Someone who wonders if we've always been this hopeless and stupid or if this is due the high mercury content in Louis Vuitton leather. Someone who needs to get it all out before he chokes a bitch.

I also do this for my friends and family who would otherwise have to endure these typed stylings in the form of red-faced rants interrupted only by a healthy amount of "am I nuts?" rhetorical laughter. Who are we kidding? I'll do that anyway. But at least I'll have prepared material.

I can't promise you'll like what I have to say or even be interested by it. I can't promise you'll learn anything. All I can promise is that everything will have a point. We should always have something to say.

And at the very least, I aim to not make anyone dumber for having read this.