Phthursday Musings: META-CLICKBAIT

or, Made You Look, You Dirty Crook

So the Internet has changed a lot over time blah blah blah and yet this is still one of the best things out there.

Or, just watch it here:

I had nothing for this week and then my boy came in to my office asking weird questions and I wound up having to explain to him the Great Chicago Fire and the 1927 New York Yankees and I whispered in his ear and asked if he wanted to see the video and that is how I wound up watching Homsar’s character video tonight.

Then he said we had to show Mom and so we did and she said she didn’t know what was going on and she wasn’t sure she liked it and then she was like, wait, is that where you got that from?

My wife thinks so much of me that she thought I came up with p’shoo all on my own.

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I’m not sure exactly how to spell p’shoo. If you type that into Google, it thinks you’re looking for SHOO, which is the NASDAQ symbol for Steve Madden, and I have to admit here that I had to look more closely because I wasn’t really sure what Steve Madden was. It’s… a shoe company. Which I could have guessed. Founded by Steve Madden. Which I also could have guessed.

But for all I knew this was like the Freddy Jones Band, which had no member named Freddy Jones. I mean, maybe they weren’t even a band. If they hadn’t named themselves after absolutely nobody then nobody would remember them at all. This is different from Lynyrd Skynyrd. Of course it is.

I for one think it’s totally fine that I didn’t really know what Steve Madden was. Looking at their website (his website? its website?) at the page for men’s shoes, it lets you narrow down by color, and the first color available is “ANIMAL”, and that pretty much tells me all I need to know. Where is the market for this stuff? Venus?

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When I am in the car and am just going to listen to the radio what I now do is I rotate between four stations, all of them nominally rock stations.

One of them is the classic rock station. This station is highly predictable.

Another one is sort of a classic rock station, if all of the ‘80s are included. I guess this station isn’t nominally rock because they also play things like Prince and Madonna. But mostly it’s rock music that’s on average 10 years later than the classic rock station.

A third is the rock station. This includes classic rock, a lot of ‘90s stuff, and then also manages to sneak into the new century and play awful bullshit from 2001 or so.

A fourth is also the rock station. This one actually plays music released in the last 10 years. But, it’s not a hard rock station. Sometimes you hear something inspired like Little Feat. Sometimes you hear something atrocious.

I mostly stick with the classic rock station, for two reasons. First, it’s the one of the four which, for me, has the lowest bullshit quotient. But even more so than that, it’s the only one of the four where the DJs don’t drive me insane.

I am sure this just means that I am a cranky old man but, seriously, shouldn’t a good DJ be some mixture of soothing and uplifting? Shouldn’t they know not to talk over a song?

Chicagoland dwellers will probably figure out which station is which from the above descriptions. I welcome all angsty responses.

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I asked my boy if he wanted any coins from other countries. I wasn’t really sure what kind of answer I’d get. He’s only recently beginning to think about money in terms of it being a lot or not a lot, and noticing prices of things, and having confusing ideas about what is and is not affordable, and trying to figure out when he gets to buy a Tesla, and who knows what else. Well, I figure, coins themselves are good tools for more meaningfully learning about money, and he may as well learn that other countries don’t use dollars, they use euros or pesos or rubles or yen or whatever.

Well, my question got turned around into this: What is the biggest coin?

So I looked it up, and it’s so much more ridiculous than I expected:

The Australian Kangaroo One Tonne Gold Coin.

I’m not sure who the happy bloke is, but it seems he may be a representative from the Perth Mint, which has got to be an absolutely bonkers establishment, because mints are bonkers, and a mint in Perth must be the most bonkers of them all. I mean, they created a gold coin that weighs a ton. Who does that?

In 1996 Pavement put out a curious release, the Pacific Trim EP. The ostensible reason for issuing this, I believe, was that they wanted to have a new release because they were going to tour Australia and New Zealand. This was a 3-song CD, but if you got the 7”, there was a bonus song: “I Love Perth”.

Well, we just took it all face value. Australia is way on the other side of the world, and it’s cool. Perth is way on the other side of Australia, and Malkmus loves it, so it must be the absolute coolest.

To this day, 25 years later, I still have it in my mind that Perth is the place to visit. I have absolutely no idea what I would do there. Except, now, I think, I would go to the Perth Mint.

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Apropos to nothing, and to everything, here are Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers playing “Affection” on the Dutch television show TopPop from September 1978:

Today in a work meeting the question was asked, what are you listening to? This is distinct from the question what do you listen to and so I answered it based on how the week has gone.

And the answers I gave were: I’ve been listening to Manuel de Falla at the gym, and Rust Never Sleeps the other night driving home.

And I’ve been listening to Manuel de Falla, a Spanish composer from the early 20th century I’d not heard of before, because of how enthusiastic Jonathan Richman was in talking about him to Andrew Bird in the video I shared here two weeks ago.

And I was listening to Rust Never Sleeps because the sound of “Hey Hey, My My” is so wonderful. It’s harsh, raw, scuzzy, doesn’t sound quite right, and it’s absolutely perfect.

While writing this, and while allowing more from the TopPop recording play, I realize that “New England” must, shockingly, be indirectly the source of something I made up as a kid some 37 years ago. I recorded multiple different songs called “Tanvidy Days” and in one version the “chorus” went something like this:

Tanvidy, Tanvidy, Tanny Tan Days

Tanvidy, Tanvidy, Tanny Tan Days

Tanvidy, Tanvidy

Tanny Tan Days

Oh, oh, Ireland

The “Oh, oh, Ireland” is exactly like Jonathan Richman’s “Oh, oh, New England”.

I mean, yes, I’m sure I heard Jonathan Richman plenty of times when I was little, along with Blondie and Pink Floyd and Wild Man Fischer. And I listened to that first Modern Lovers album plenty of times. But still, it took me this long to make that association. Huh.

Now, I’ve never been big about going down the Youtube rabbit hole from video to video. My boy has already been hooked by this. But I’ll be damned if it’s not Jonathan Richman hauling me in. I think, if I told Jonathan this, he would tell me to get up and go take a walk.

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Tanvidy, interestingly, is not a word. If you search for it, you get weird junk, but the only hits which actually involve Tanvidy are both me. One is my Instagram account. Now you know.

The other, to my great surprise and incredulity, is a Youtube video I uploaded 14 years ago of my beagle urinating on the carpet:

So, um.

Somebody had been peeing on the carpet.

But, there were two suspects.

And I had no way of knowing. I mean, I thought it was Sara Beagle. But I didn’t know.

And so I somehow figured out how to set up a webcam with a motion detector setting, and one day, a few days into trying to get it to work, I got the footage I was looking for.

Why did I upload this to Youtube? I think because I didn’t know where else to share a video from. This was 14 years ago. I must have included a link to the video from my Livejournal or something.

Here’s the thing I really do not understand: THE VIDEO HAS 953 VIEWS.

You were wondering where exactly the META-CLICKBAIT was going to come in. Oh, believe me, I was wondering too. And, behold, I found it, in a literal pool of dog piss.

Oh, the Internet has changed a lot over time blah blah blah. But:

The Internet is forever, kids.

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P’shoo.