i dont know why. who cares why. anyway, they do.

dear kids of america, and canaduh. learn how to play the damn guitar.

mars may need women but this planet needs rock.

i dont know what happened 10-15 years ago but i flip on my mtv2 and i see Simple Plan and Good Charlotte and i know why you kids are so damn uptight. hell, id be uptight if thats all Viacom was showing me back when i was comin up.

while youre learning to play guitar learn how to rock it. rock that fucking thing kids. are you listening to me? dont strum it like dave matthews. dont flick at it like john mayer, dont rest your arm on it like the strokes do.

rock that shit bitch.

then learn how to table dance, then learn how to take heroin, then learn how to appear in court (pictured).

and if you think im bullshitting youre nuts.

i need my rock stars to come back to me.

i need my fucked up twisted angry passionate poets and priestesses to hitch up their vintage skirts and return to the stage cuz this bullshit im seeing and listening to on the radio and mtv is bullshit.

courtney love, regardless of what you think of her, is 10 times the rock star of any of the pimply faced fuckups that i see on tv and thats not even debatable.

we live in dark, dull times, adolescents

learn how to play the rock music

listen to johnny cash

give mouth to mouth to the ghosts of punk rock past.

fuck snow + jeff mcmanus + everything is wrong

than a democratic presidential nominee who knows how to pump up a house full of downtrodden campaign volunteers is to be a gay professional athlete.

which is why cleveland indian relief pitcher Kazuhito Tadano (pictured, far left) is trying to distance himself from his appearance in a xxx homosexual porno tape.

“All of us have made mistakes in our lives,” Tadano told a group of cleveland reporters regarding an adult tape he made in college. “Hopefully, you learn from them and move on.”

the 23 yr old swears that although he performed a homosexual act in the film, he is not gay.

regarless, the japanese pro leagues dont want him; and seeing that no MLB, NFL, NBA or NHL players are openly gay it looks as if this flamethrower, tadano might be screwedano.

the AP reports that none of the cleveland minor league teams that kasuhito played with cared that he had done his little film. openly. i find that refreshing.

if we’re openminded enough to have a dipshit as president why cant the tribe have a closer who loves liza?

thats my only question.

even though i grew up in the sexually conservative (if not repressed) midwest, after last years playoff debacle by the Cubs i would bet that if this apologetic japanese pitcher could do for the cubs in the pros what he did for the indians in the minors last year (6-2 with a 1.55 ERA and three saves with three teams on three levels of the minors and in akron he didn’t allow a run in his first 28 innings and struck out 78 in 72 2-3 innings) the bleacher bums would wave pink hankercheifs to root his uh, ass, on.

as they should.

homophobia in sports in 2004 is pretty gay.

perotheus + aarons baseball blog + lane

i hear you will be offering free high speed internet wirelessly in all of your rooms starting this summer.

actually i read it on my pal matt welch’s blog.

lots of people learn things from blogs.

thats why i would like to work for you and write a blog for you.

i would like to travel to all of your locations and write a little something about the facility and the town.

sorta like charles kuralt’s on the road

but better.

minus the mistress.

for example if i worked for you, right now i would drive over to houston for the super bowl and blog, i mean write on your blog, about houston and the best westerns in the houston area.

i would take pictures.

i have a good camera.

i believe the blog that i could create with you could be one that would appeal to your 18-34 demographic, which i would imagine, would be your target market.

i have excellent references.

im a courteous guest who rarely steals towels

and i promise i wont fill my cooler with ice from the ice machine.

please hire me to write your blog.

your pal,

tony pierce

chokey chicken’s favorite blogger + bad marriage + franny + k

fyi. youre gonna have your good days and bad days and good weeks and bad weeks. my last really bad week was in october when the cubs fell apart right as i was starting to believe. that led to some unfortunate situations at my place of employment. currently im getting dumped by hot chicks, losing my shirt at games of chance, and today i even lost my wallet.

whats most embarrassing about it was i was about to get some clothes at the hot topic.

cuz im so punk.

i had my eye on this baby blue simpsons pin pal bowling shirt with the name homer stitched in cursive over the pocket. and some pants. fifty five bucks out the door.

dug around my backpack. pimp was in there. a few really good r&b cds from the 40s were in there.

some chicks lip balm from nordstrom was in there somehow.

baseball cards, power bars, old bus passes, my blogger hoodie, my dumb cell phone,

but no wallet.

so i called my man john woo and asked him if he could look around chopper one for me, he did

nothin.

the girl put my shit on hold for a day.

i can see the stitched on picture of apu and the gang all stuffed in that black plastic bag waiting to be on my back tomorrow as we go to the valley to bowl, we being the xbi travelling bowling team.

lucky for me that i took a hundred bucks out of the atm this afternoon and stuffed it in my wallet right before i misplaced it into the universe.

nothin better than finding a wallet fat with greenbacks

and a condom that doesnt expire for a long time

and a barely used library card

and a buspass with four days left on it.

but the weirdest thing about all of this

is i couldnt give a shit for some reason.

it’s nice.

it’s even sorta funny.

jarrett + jason + moveon

TSAR

“Straight”/”The Creature in Disguise”

(Birdman)

Their pad is very messy, they got whiskers on their chin, they’re gone on powerpop music, and they always play to win. Or so the A-side tries to convey, though these L.A. formalists clearly mean to beg the straightness question merely by raising it.

In their first songs to surface since their worthy 2000 debut album, they pound and swing the boogie harder and sweeter than ever; both tracks would fit real well on Cheap Trick’s All Shook Up, so Tsar’s guitars could offer quite the machismo lesson to Weezer, whose T-shirts their “Tsar the Rock Group” slogan recalls.

Even more blatant: quotes/references to “Pretty Vacant,” “Bat Out of Hell,” and “I’m Straight” by the Modern Lovers, who meant the word differently. Then, on an almost-as-flawless flip side alluding to adolescent bodies metamorphosing monster-like, “My Generation,” the Move’s Shazam, and B?C’s “Godzilla.” Or maybe the Dolls’ “Frankenstein.” Or Edgar Winter’s.

Do the crossword puzzle yourself for once, bucko.

– Chuck Eddy, Village Voice, Singles Again, January 28 – February 3, 2004

but she knows everything, so i tell her everything. usually about chicks. today i was telling her something and she said, oh, can you do me a favor and go through one day without talking about girls or women or sex or anything like that? ok. thanks.

she said it bitchy like that dude in office space. it was funny. whenever people try to be mean to me and are being sarcastic or whatever i just laugh. sometimes i will just go on doing what they ask me not to go on doing. its almost a dare to me.

then she said youre not even talking about the girl that i want you to talk about and i was all who do you want me to talk about and she said the girl on the top of your blog thing.

its always freaky when people from work read this because i pretend that nobody reads this and i dont have to pretend about that at work cuz pretty much nobody from work does read it. and i told her that me and karisa are friends and we’re keeping it that way. plus shes the wrong sign, so hush. and she said well dont talk about girls today unless youre gonna talk about her. i like her. i said i like her too, but this other one this morning, whoa….

this chick is hot. theyre all hot. everything is hot in LA today except me and the weather. 51 degrees this morning and i know i have no room to bitch cuz the country is shivvering but excuse me, LA should not be 51 degrees in january. it should be 71. didnt we discuss this recently when it wasnt 80?

took the escalator down the platform to the subway this morning and i saw a guy in a huge lakers parka sleeping on the slat where people usually sit. they make them hard and uncomfortable on purpose so as to keep people from sleeping on them and i thought about how when i was at uc isla vista they told us that we didnt know what real life was that we would get out of the fantasy land of santa barbara soon and the sooner the better and when i saw that guy this morning i was thinking fuck the real world. send me back to fantasy land.

and then i sat next to my sleeping los angelino and opened my book to where my m&ms wrapper was holding my place and continued reading pimp by iceberg slim.

bettiegirl + jackbog + kitty bukakke

i missed you. then why do i feel like not writing any more for a long long time. i think the world is doing one of those lets see if we can spin completely upside down right now. the pope witnessed breakdancing, clint got on stage and said i know i dont look like sean penn… but i am, and the hot babe in average joe made out with the good looking guy who didnt even know what a romance novel is.

i put up the first few pages of lick today and parts of it make me very very happy and parts scare the shit out of me. my natural reaction is to just say fuckit and not do it but i did that with blook 2 and some people wanted my ass. there was this study a while back about perfectionists and winners and most winners it turned out were not perfectionists and the study was done on quarterbacks in the nfl and many of them won because they werent afraid to fuck up, they just went for it, warts and all, they didnt allow the little (or big) things stop them from going forward.

and when you look at guys like our current president (not pictured, sadly) who if he was any other decent person would look at the state the planet was in when he stole the election and look at the state of the planet today, and the decent person would probably apologize and step down gracefully. a perfectionist woulda probably shot hisself right in the head. but winners, and i hate to say it, but dumbshit sure does find a way to win, winners hang in there and keep slugging away even if the only person who benefits from their bs is them.

so lick will launch at halftime of the superbowl for your asses, as planned. even if it isnt exactly what i want it to be.

how could it be more like i want it to be? you could write for it, for starters. and by you, i mean you.

you know who you are.

work wasnt so bad but i wasnt feeling it all day. im not sick, i can feel the disturbance in the force, maybe tomorrow we’ll figure out what it is, was, whatever, but my truest called tonight and she told me to go for it, clipper girls cousin called tonight and told me to go for it, and raspil iverson the designer of the lick blog wrote something so normal and so perfect for lick and i put it on the page and it didnt look perfect but it will do for today but it was the writing.

sometimes its nice just to read normal words from a normal person about normal things

and thats better than people trying to be all flowery and writer-y or any of that.

she told the story and got out of the way and it was great.

and if theres one thing i want to do from lick is help people understand that theres lots of ways to write well and the best way is their way as cheesy as that sounds its the truth and another thing i want people to learn is that even though we call it a world wide web, we are completely separated in most cases. and now is the time to have a greater cohesiveness if we want.

its like a playground with a thousand basketballs and a thousand hoops and everyone is shooting freethrows,

my invitation to you is to play together

just a few times a month.

ladies first.

women of the web, if you’d like to write something for lick, now is the time. wednesday at 10pm pacific time is the deadline for the first edition of this new thing. if i didnt contact you personally please dont be put off, i contacted very few people personally. i wanted Lick to be something mostly wordofmouth like buzznet and friendster and that super visual x that was going around last weekend in hollywood.

you can fictionalize things, you can factualize things, you can write about things that youd never think youd ever write down let alone email to someone, and you can also write about normal things that interest you.

whatever you do, write. write like its ok to write. write like todays the day and if you want write like whatever it is that you write will touch someone, even an undercover vigilante helicopter pilot who secretly just wants to direct.

porn.

i love you faceless rockstars of the worldwideweb. im glad to be back and if anything inside my head whispers to me that i should stop i will just think about my hero ray rayner who was there for me every morning growing up.

the mc has a new cam + this girl turns me on + i love brians video

in order to honor and mourn one of my all-time favorite tv heroes, there will be no new updates to the busblog until Tuesday, January 27.

we’ve never stopped the bus before. not when ive gotten carpal tunnel, not when i was on vacation, not even when the cubs lost in the playoffs after being up 3-1 with the two best pitchers in baseball throwing for them.

but this is far different.

ray rayner was and is my idol.

Ray Rayner, Star Of “Ray Rayner and his Friends,” on WGN-TV In The 1960s And ’70s, Dies

Chicago Tribune

January 21, 2004

Ray Rayner, the actor who played Oliver O. Oliver on “Bozo’s Circus” for a decade and who hosted his own kids’ show ‘Ray Rayner and His Friends” for 19 years on WGN-TV, passed away on January 21 following complications from pneumonia. He was 84 years old.

Mr. Rayner retired from WGN-TV in December 1980. Fans can visit wgntv.com to share their favorite Ray Rayner memories. The message board will be up until next Friday, January 30, 2004.

“Ray was a good guy. That’s the one thing that everybody remembers about him. When he was on the air – that’s the impression you got. He was a very friendly, warm person. That’s one of the reasons his morning show was so tremendously successful,” commented Allen Hall, a former colleague and the longtime producer of “The Bozo Show” on WGN-TV.

“Ray Rayner was most definitely one of Chicago’s Very Own. Ray’s work was enjoyed by everyone who grew up in Chicago,” commented John Vitanovec, VP/General Manager of WGN-TV. “His tenure here at WGN is still a time recalled fondly by our viewers. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. He will be missed.”

WGN-TV hired Ray Rayner to portray Sergeant Henry Pettibone as host of the “Dick Tracy” show in 1961. He joined “Bozo’s Circus” as Oliver O. Oliver that same year and continued in that role until 1971. In 1962, Ray replaced Dick Coughlan as host of “Breakfast with Bugs Bunny.” In 1964, the show was renamed “Ray Rayner and His Friends,” and quickly became a staple to thousands of Chicagoland grade school children. “Ray Rayner and His Friends” ran until January, 1981. In 1966, the “Dick Tracy” show ended a five-year run and Ray hosted “Rocket to Adventure” for two-seasons.

“Ray Rayner and His Friends,” which aired weekday mornings, featured cartoons, songs, pantomime antics, jokes, riddles, mock newscasts and daily weather forecasts geared to the younger set, as well as traffic, sports and news information for parents. Ray’s canine puppet friend Cuddly Dudley visited the program twice a week, and one day a week was set aside for a “do-it-yourself project.” Ray showed his young viewers how to make everything from pup pencil holders, to mushroom pincushions, to stocking mice. Once a week Dr. Lester Fisher, director of the Lincoln Park Zoo, and Ray took viewers behind-the-scenes at the zoo. Chelveston the duck was also a regular visitor to the show. Any off-camera staff or crew was referred to as “Chauncy.”

Ray left Chicago television in 1981 and became a weather forecaster and fill-in news anchor for the CBS affiliate in Albuquerque, New Mexico until 1989. In his “spare time,” Rayner hosted the nationally syndicated “PM Magazine,” and wrote three original plays. In 1984, he returned to Chicago to join the cast of “Guys and Dolls.” He made several guest appearances as himself on “The Bozo Show” and in WGN-TV anniversary specials.

Born in New York City, Ray was a navigator on a B-17 in the United States Air Force and spent two years in a German military prison camp. He picked up a taste for acting during his POW days and pursued the profession during his college years following the war.

After the war, Rayner returned to a Long Island radio station, and he started to work his way west to Dayton, Ohio, then Grand Rapids, Michigan. He hosted music and quiz programs and wrote some news. In 1953 he found himself in Chicago, auditioning at WBBM-TV. There, Rayner worked for eight years on a variety of children’s shows including “Rayner Shine,” “The Little Show” with a duck named Havelock, and in “Popeye’s Firehouse,” as Chief Abernathy. He had an active career as a commercial announcer and as an MC on a teenage dance party program. He was also one of the first Ronald McDonalds to appear in network television commercials.

Throughout much of his career, Ray Rayner also acted on the serious side of theater, playing demanding roles in such productions as Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” “Assassination, 1865,” “The Rainmaker,”and “The Caine Mutiny.” He also appeared in lighter productions such as “The Odd Couple” and “Fiddler on the Roof.” Reaching out to younger actors, Rayner directed students in Loyola Academy productions.

Rayner attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass, and then went on to Fordham University in New York where he graduated with a B.A. degree in literature and philosophy. He also received an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Ray was the recipient of many awards including local Emmy Awards, and most recently, in 2000, Rayner was inducted into the Chicago Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Silver Circle.

Mr. Rayner was most recently enjoying his retirement in Fort Meyers, Florida. He is survived by his second wife Marie Rayner, daughter Christina Miller, son Mark Rayner, and four grandchildren: Troy, Hilary, Sean and Patrick.

ive set up this blog is that sometimes i have a cool picture that i want to post so i have to write enough of godknowswhat that will sorta match up with the picture, but what if i only have a few lines to say about it, then what, then do i just drone on and on so that the text can make it around the picture and “look good”, or do i change the subject to something completely unrelated to the first few paragraphs and try to play it off as punk rock.

everyone knows you cant be punk rock in a blog.

sally was a pretty girl but hid it. i didnt even see it till she unzipped her army jacket unbuttoned her flannel and pulled up her stooges shirt. i unsnaped her three clasped fredricks number like that and suddenly i was surrounded. before midnight i was alone again and thinking of what to write to you cuz if i wrote about it right away i was afraid that she’d think that she couldnt trust me, that shed think that everything we did together would get recorded photographed documented and posted, immediately.

she was a writer from back east. flew out here and rented a motorcyle. i said nice canvas bag, she said its hemp, i said i love you. she said yes but i love you. she said whats punk about tsar i said the pink one stars she said isnt it gay i said gay is ten percent punk is one percent and tsar are the kings of the school.

she said what about the corvids, i said the corvids were not only last years best album but the most interesting surprise next to the polyspronic spree or whatever theyre called.

she asked why do men like plaid miniskirts so much do you think and she recrossed her legs and i caught a glimpse of her tartan and she said is there a reason and i said plaid has a lot of things going on in it. youve got a thick stripe going that way and a see thru line going this way and a thin line going going through all of them. and then of course you get that sweet territory known as the thigh

she said do you like pale girls

i said i love pale girls

she said whats the coolest thing youve seen this week and uncrossed her legs and leaned closer to me

and i said the peanuts gang dancing and singing to outkast.