Some of you may already have seen the YouTube video documenting American intellectual prowess, but in case not, it’s worth a view. Watch it and decide if it’s depressing or hilarious….

It’s called Americans Are Not Stupid, with Subtitles. It’s a few minutes long.

This reminds me of a funny story. Or a depressing story. Definitely a related story. Yesterday a member of my family sent a petition to other members of my family (not me). The petition was one of those bogus right-wing scare tactic petitions talking about how the bad “illegals” are trying to steal good, patriotic Americans’ jobs and social security and so on. The petition also claimed Congress recently passed a bill allowing “illegals” to have social security benefits. A false rumor that’s well-worn. The e-mail’s even in Snopes.

Anyway, the petition demands that only U.S. CITIZENS be allowed social security benefits, or any social services. My relative who sent it was born in the United States. Her husband (my brother) and parents-in-law (my parents) were not. They’re all legal residents (who’ve long paid social security taxes), but not citizens. So my relative SIGNED MY BROTHER’S NAME to a petition that demands he lose his social security benefits. Brilliant. Then she forwarded it to his non-citizen parents, suggesting they sign it too. Double brilliant.

I asked her about this later and she told me she forgot that we (including her husband) are all “aliens.” She then pointed out that either way, the petition is how a lot of people feel. Then she said not to worry because no one is referring to us. Apparently, she doesn’t understand what the word “citizen” means.

The upside to this…. Well, ok, there isn’t an upside to this. But in my fantasy resolution, my relative is disqualified from voting. That’s because to become a citizen and voter, you have to take a basic citizenship test and have half a brain. And I figure if you’re an English speaker with half a brain, you know what the word “citizen” means. That’s what you’re taking a test for! So in my fantasy, she fails the test, I make an uncitizen’s arrest, and the feds consider Guantanamo.

Ok, silly fantasy and bad to make jokes about Guantanamo, one of the more depraved entities in modern U.S. history. And of course, if I believe in equal rights for all, I have to allow room for dumb people. This does, however, bring me back to the above video. My relative belongs in it.

Do some of you have relatives who belong in it?

Sunday at almost exactly 2 a.m., I was in the middle of a particularly bad dream when the phone rang. Everyone hates phone calls in the middle of the night, and ever since I moved to the States, I’ve been convinced that if the phone rings late at night, it can only mean that my parents are calling to let me know my grandmother has died. (She’s fine, in case you’re wondering where this is going.)

I stayed under the covers and waited to hear the answering machine pick up. I don’t know if it was the relative quiet in the middle of the night or something else, but the machine filled the apartment. It wasn’t my parents, as I said, but this instead:

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I understand that it’s not exactly heavy breathing, or someone asking me what my favorite scary movie is. But when the loud, random beeping started sounding like Mary Had a Little Lamb (it’s about 35 seconds in), I admit I was scared shitless. By then, I had woken up Kris, who had slept right through the ringing phone.

“Hon,” he asked softly, “Where is that noise coming from?”

I realized, of course, that as scary as it had been for me, it must be even more nerve wracking for Kris to wake up to a strange, computerized version of a nursery rhyme booming through the house. The message ended and Kris got up to check the caller ID (there was a name and a local number) and make sure all the doors were locked. I thought about calling the number back, but I realized that either drunk kids were fooling around and were hardly likely to sound apologetic, or (what seemed more likely) the evil monsters that were calling me in a horror movie-like way might be less likely to kill me during the day.

We both slept fitfully. At dawn this morning, Kris (who usually can sleep through anything) woke up, rattled that the phone was ringing again. I told him he was just hearing birds chirp, because I had been awake for a while and knew what woke him.

The number turned out to belong to a residential address just a few blocks from us, and after work today, we tried calling it back. Ironically, the machine always picked up– it had voice of an old man cheerfully announcing his name. There’s no chance that the old man died, and his ghost was trying to call us, is there?

This is old news, but new to me, and it really freaks me out. A teenager in Cloquet, MN, is on trial for dousing elderly nursing home residents with ice water.

To reiterate: this kid and 2-3 of his firends took pitchers of ice water and poured them on old people’s heads. Like four different times since last summer.

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

According to a criminal complaint, the Cloquet teenager told police he found it so funny when he dumped a pitcher of ice water on a 90-year-old nursing home resident in June that he returned and did it twice more, in December and again last month.

Cold water on old people! What will they think of next! This will be hi-larious! OK, I realize you live in Cloquet, Minnesota. There aren’t any good movies playing. You’re bored out of your skull. But can’t you just get stoned in your parents’ basement like all the other small-town teenagers? Set fire to the woods or something? Develop a harmless crush on your second cousin?

From the Star Tribune:

“They got the idea from a movie, and they thought it would be funny,” said detective Jeff Palmer, who questioned the boys. He said the teens, who were about 15 or 16 years old, said they couldn’t remember the name of the movie.

I knew it was Hollywood’s fault . . . Or maybe video games; isn’t drenching the aged with ice water one of the harder levels in Grand Theft Auto Miami?

OK, they can’t remember the name of the movie (because there brain cells are all filled up with being mean); how about you? Anybody remember that movie with the ice-soaking of old folks? Matt?

I fell down in the bathroom last week. In my apartment, this is actually quite an accomplishment, since the bathroom is only slightly larger than our refridgerator, and the walls pressing in on you tend to restrict any kind of movement.

I went down due to vertigo, which I don’t usually suffer from, but my inner ear was all wonky from a cold. I’d had a cold for about a week and a half, and I was so tired of having a stuffed head, I’d become kind of liberal about my nose-blowing. None of this polite sniffling demurely into a tissue. I was trumpeting like an elephant, in the desperate hope that I could breathe though my nose for 3 or 4 seconds before it filled up with snot again.

This nose-blowing is some dangerous stuff. Apparently I upset the delicate pressure balance between inner and outer ear because, after hearing a pop and a crackle, the bathroom spun like I was back in my college dormroom.

I was fine after a couple of minutes, but the lasting damage was that, between flinging my hands to my ears and going down on one knee, I managed to knock my glasses into the toilet. If falling down in my tiny bathroom was an accomplishment, this was the coup de grace.

I didn’t have a lot of options. My hand would have to go into the toilet. That was obvious. I could have looked around for some kind of stick. Or claw. If I had a claw. But I wasn’t thinking straight (a claw?!) and it seemed like the longer my glasses stayed in the toilet, the worse they became. Like they were melting in there — or getting dirtier, some kind of clause in the 2-second rule.

I got them out and put ‘em in the sink. I washed my hands, a lot. I looked at my glasses. I washed my hands again. My glasses just sat there. One more hand wash. My eyesight seemed to improve by the minute. Did I really even need glasses? I mean, really?

I ran them under scalding water for a long time. Then I steadied my nerves with a stiff drink, closed my eyes, and stuffed them back onto my face.

There’ll be dire consequences, I’m sure. I’ll let you know.

This guy got trapped in his own e-mail, and then sent himself to my computer. Dumbass!

I got this e-mail and I read it like it was a normal e-mail, and not the deranged musings of a crazy person, until I got to the bottom and the sender literally jumped off the page at me.

But, I think it could make a good 3rd annual caption contest. Like the New Yorker’s cartoon caption thingy, but less prestigious.

So . . . post a comment with a funny caption for this picture.

The other night at the bar, two of our friends tried to tell Pulao and me about a practical joke called “doortricking”.

“Have you ever heard of doortricking?”

“No,” we said.

“Well,” our friends continued somewhat sheepishly, “When someone goes into the bathroom, you strip naked and do a handstand right outside the door, so when they open the bathroom door, well . . . they’re surprised.”

Of course it turns out that “doortricking” can only be confirmed to have been done twice in the history of the world . . . both times by the same guy that they know (let’s call him “John”.) So this is not exactly sweeping the nation and maybe more aptly called “John is somewhat acrobatic and likes to take his pants off.”

I mulled the whole thing over for a while before I decided that this was not the practical joke for me. First of all, the elaborate joke would get even more complicated with the addition of the crane I would require to get into a handstand. And more importantly, any practical joke where you’re the one who ends up standing on your head, naked, defeats the whole purpose.

I came across this machine when I was at a Mall in Roseville, Minnesota. In case you can’t tell, those are iPods and iPod accessories in the vending machine for when you have that hankering that a diet coke just won’t quench…

Go Democrats!

And now to more important things: YouTube & Hamsters

From the Wall Street Journal:

Coming to Your TV — Homemade Hamster Videos?

Web sites like YouTube have vaulted into the vanguard of Internet entertainment by providing a medium for people to post videos of practically any imaginable activity, from bizarre pet antics to teenagers riding shopping carts into walls.

Now some of the country’s largest telecom operators, including Comcast Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc., are trying to determine if there’s a business in putting such videos on television.

On Monday, Comcast launched a trial version of ziddio.com, a Web site that uses contests to attract homegrown videos, with the best then available for Comcast’s video-on-demand TV service. Verizon, meantime, is close to a deal with YouTube, according to people familiar with the matter. If it happens, Verizon TV subscribers are likely to be able to watch the top YouTube videos of the day for a fee.

…

Some small-time producers see some value in being on TV. Jessica Wells runs a hamster shelter in New York, and recently added videos to the shelter’s Web site that were produced by site visitors. She’d like to see them go on TV to help her raise funds and to educate viewers on proper hamster treatment. Ms. Wells says some of her videos get hundreds of hits. “People are continuously underestimating either how much free time people have or how much people are intrigued by other people’s lives,” she says.

[since the article needs a subscription, the full text is after the jump... mainly just business-y stuff]

(more…)

Sufjan Stevens, Illinois (2005)

Talkdemonic, Beat Romantic (2006)

Victory at Sea, All Your Things Are Gone (2005)

Young People, All at Once (2006)

First off, I should say that this post is several years past its expiration date. It’s like I see a requiem for indie rock in some magazine or another every year, so I shouldn’t annoy anyone by adding my voice to the chorus now. But the sheer mediocrity of three of my recent CD orders left me with no other way to review them than by clustering them into a eulogy. And I threw in Sufjan Stevens for good measure.

So what is “indie rock”? I’ll assign Sufjan Stevens, Talkdemonic, Victory at Sea, and Young People to that genre because they’re all vaguely poppish (which is almost like being rock) and they’re all on indie labels. But stylistically, I don’t think “indie rock” means anything anymore; at this point it designates only a mode of distribution. The underground network of independent labels and distributors, which used to deliver specifically non-commercial rock, has (with the help of online music retailing) stepped into the void created by the major music conglomerates’ continual swallowing of smaller labels. Signing to an independent label is no longer a statement of musical ideals: it’s a viable career move. You won’t have a #1 album, but you can still get your music to the masses.

Which is a shame, because the perpetrators of these albums really don’t need to be heard. Take Talkdemonic. The duo comprises a fiddler, Lisa Molinaro, and a multi-instrumentalist mastermind, Kevin O’Connor. Beat Romantic, the liner notes helpfully tell me, is “the second Talkdemonic record.” Released on the ironically named Arena Rock label, it features lovely cover art of white-barked birch trunks in a row under a canopy of green leaves. And the music sounds like it was recorded in a bedroom with a Starbucks latte at hand. It’s offensively inoffensive. A reviewer might refer to “delicately plucked acoustic guitar,” “whispers of organ,” “reedy violin.” I might put this on in the background while I’m surfing the Internet, then get frustrated halfway through and exchange the CD for something else. The only one of these sixteen instrumental tracks I could identify after it has passed is “White Gymnasium,” thanks to the nautical flute line that graces it. The album is very polished and very pretty, and I mean that in the worst way possible.

For something equally low in energy, trying Young People’s All at Once. After about five listens, I finally cottoned on to who Young People sounds like: Cat Power. Katie isn’t as good a singer as Chan Marshall, but she does offer the same wispy, alcoholic vocal haze; I don’t think she delivers a single song in full voice. It makes me tune out, so I’m not sure I can remember any of the lyrics. These might be lines from “Slow-Moving Storm”: “Angel bright and fair / Take me to your care.” Or they might not be. It’s her voice that mires All at Once in the realm of passionless music I don’t care about. They have some interesting musical ideas, like the distortion-drowned piano riff of “Reapers,” but too many of those ideas meander into collapse. They sound like they got bored while recording; why should I be interested while listening?

I think Victory at Sea’s album, All Your Things Are Gone, is the clearest sign that anything underground about the indie world has long since been abolished. The band starts off with some trendy angular post-punk (“No Reason to Stay,” “Cecille”) before moving into strange storytelling (“The Letter”), but finally softens to reveal itself as a purveyor of Carole King adult-contemporary piano pop (“Turn It Around” onward: six songs out of ten). This kind of music isn’t in vogue right now, but there’s no stylistic weirdness that would prevent Victory at Sea from having a hit single. All Your Things Are Gone is a 2005 release, so it’s past its sell-by date already, but may I suggest “Bored Otherwise” as the potential hit that could have led listeners to this filler-packed extravaganza?

Speaking of hits, filler, and piano pop: Sufjan Stevens. I’m not as in touch with indie politics as I used to be—blame the dullness of the music—so I might be wrong about this, but I think Stevens is today’s biggest indie star. He got enough press on what was probably an off-the-cuff comment about making an album for each of the fifty states that he decided to follow his love letter to Michigan with 2005’s study of Illinois. Even the outtakes got great reviews.

But I must say, I’m not impressed. First of all, Illinois doesn’t have any moves on it that weren’t already in display on Michigan—I suppose Stevens has his Beatles-style “Revolution” with the electrified Superman song, whose title I will not exhaust my fingers by typing, but Stevens’s distorted guitar work only reminds me of the excruciating, incomprehensibly reissued A Sun Came! Otherwise, there’s a lot of the Charlie-Brown-soundtrack piano, orchestral instrumentation, softly sung melodies, and pensive lyrics that have long stocked Stevens’s releases. The musicianship has come a long way since Michigan, in that there’s no spit-filled trumpet here, but then the bedroom-recording aesthetic was part of the charm of early Sufjan (and if Talkdemonic had left some rough edges unsanded, their bland instrumental pop might have had more character).

The word I want to use to describe Illinois is “professional.” And that’s part of the problem. “Professional” implies a received standard, an external framework of values. “Professional” demands a pre-established sound and promises a primarily financial reward. So here’s a word to describe Stevens: “accomplished.” As in “mission.” He found a career path and he’s treading it to the usual terminus.

This is why indie isn’t indie anymore. Underground rock was supposed to be about finding your own voice, about making your own noise. Early indie bands (I’m thinking of those profiled in Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Black Flag, Minutemen, Mission of Burma) went independent because they had to—major labels weren’t willing to take a chance on their weird music. There’s no reason a major label wouldn’t want to take a chance on Stevens. He’s cute, friendly, low-budget, and has already proven himself. Stevens may decide he wants to stick with Asthmatic Kitty, but that doesn’t mean he’s underground. If you need proof, just get The Avalanche (outtakes from Illinois). I haven’t heard it and I’m not going to, but: recording 150 minutes of music for a single album and then releasing the outtakes separately, as if even your rejects are gems? Smells like Fleetwood Mac to me.

Come up with a caption for this pic I took in Denver.