BlackChampagne.com -- Daily Ramblings

Navigation

Buy Crap! I get 5%.
Direct donations to cover hosting expenses are also welcome.

Site Information
• What is Black Champagne?
• Cast of Characters/Things
• Your First Time
• Design Notes
• Quote of the Day Archive
• Phrase of the Moment Archive
• Site Feedback
• Contact/Copyright Info

Blog Archives
• Blogger Archives: June 2005-present
• Old Archives: Jan 2002-May 2005

Reviews Section
Movie Reviews (153)
Ten Most Recent Film Reviews:
• Infernal Affairs -- 5.5
• The Protector -- 6
• The Limey -- 8
• The Descent -- 6
• Oldboy -- 9.5
• Shaolin Deadly Kicks -- 7
• Mission Impossible III -- 7.5
• Chase Step by Step -- 7.5
• V is for Vendetta -- 8.5
• Ghost in the Shell 2 -- 6
• Night Watch -- 7.5
Book Reviews (76)
Five Most Recent Book Reviews:
• Cat People, by Michael Korda -- 4
• Attack Poodles, by James Wolcott -- 5
• Caught Stealing, by Charlie Huston -- 6
• The Dirt, by Motley Crue -- 7.5
• Harry Potter #6 -- 7

Photos and Captions
• Flux Photos
• Pet Photos (7 pages)
• Home Decor Photos
• Plant Photos
• Vacation Photos (21 pages)

Articles Section
See all 234 Articles

Fiction
Original fantasy and horror short stories.

Mail Bags
• Index Page

Features
• Links
• Slang: Internet
• Slang: Dirty
• Slang: Wankisms
• Slang: Sex Acts
• Slang: Fulldeckisms
• Hot or Not?
• Truths in Advertising

Band Name Ratings
(350 Rock Bands Listed)
FAQ • Feedback
A • B • C • D • E
F • G • H • I • J • K
L • M • N • O • P
Q • R • S • T • U
V • W • X • Y • Z

Diablo II
• The Unofficial Site
• Flux's Decahedron
• Middle Earth Mod

Disks in Rotation:
DVD • Cowboy Bebop
CD-ROM • D2X
CD Carousel
• System of a Down - Toxicity
• Exodus - Force of Habit
• Jane's Addiction - Ritual de lo Habitual
• Soil - Scars
• Tool - Undertow

Books Lying Open
• Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Brothers Grim

Soul-Devouring Worry
• Yet another project begun, never to be finished...

When I Grow Up:
• The pit in the belly will be filled.

Curse of the Day:
• May your sarcasm fall on deaf ears.

Saturday August 3, 2002

Quote of the Day
Wagner's music is better than it sounds. -- Mark Twain

Daily Blog
I got a lot of work done today, so feeling slightly proud of that. RL work was boring and not especially profitable, but it's been worse. I think I gained about four pounds yesterday, eating so much, and I'm just brushing my teeth now and about ready to eat the toothbrush I'm so hungry. Hopefully it will go away as I sleep.

Right to the news. Personal stuff below.

• Elderly woman brings a can of dog food into a police station as a reward for a police dog who bit a lawyer during his arrest, as part of a kidnapping scheme. The quote from the article is great:

But at least it should help the dog get the taste of lawyer out of its mouth.

• I posted about the mob that beat two men to death in Chicago a couple of days ago, after they hit a pedestrian, and commented that it sounded like something from a third world country. Here's a follow up article about that, but on the amusing side, here's a story from Brazil that backs up my outrageously Western-centric assertion almost perfectly.

A Brazilian babysitter who was filmed by a hidden camera allegedly hitting two babies was attacked by a mob of residents after a television station aired the video, according to a Local 6 News report

He took the tape to local police but did not receive immediate help. So, he then delivered it to a TV station. When local residents saw the hidden video on television, they attacked the babysitter in the street.
An amateur video camera caught a man drop kicking the woman and several other people punching her in the face. Leite managed to run away.

The article has footage of the babysitter on both ends of the punching, and it looks just about as you'd expect, though less funny. The "street" they attacked the babysitter in is a dirt road in front of some fields and piles of rubbage, which adds nicely to the whole atmosphere of chaos and police inaction that we've come to expect from countries like Brazil.

• A guy in the UK is trying to sell advertising space on his penis and/or butt. The article about it is the amusing part, with several real groaners. Dry British wit galore, of the type that would not be allowed in the US.

For a modest sum, you can have your logo tattooed onto a man's penis, or his buttock, or indeed both buttocks. We can only assume that this particular eBay seller is currently a bit hard-up, as it were.

Interestingly, the eBay entry is written by the man's wife, who seems to be handling this particular penis.

Sadly, it doesn't state the maximum print size available on the penis. Here's hoping he doesn't lose potential bidders if he fails to measure up to corporate expectations.

One of the conditions in the ad is rather ironic:

He reserves the right to refuse designs that he considers offensive, immoral, or objectionable.

• A study in knife skill contrasts. The two girls who were kidnapped and raped by that guy in California, before being rescued, tried to stab and kill him, and were unsuccessful.

Jacqueline said the girls took Ratliff's knife from its holster in the truck. "We got enough courage because you could see his pulse" while he slept, she said.
Jacqueline said she stabbed Ratliff in the throat, and "he woke up and he was like shocked and everything" as the 16-year-old hit him in the face with the whiskey bottle.

Ratliff opened the car door and "we both kicked him out and I threw the knife at him," Jacqueline said. The kidnapper then brandished his gun and regained control of the girls, who did not know each other before the abduction.

And then that was that? It seems pretty weird he didn't just kill them both then and there, eh? Or at least kill one of them? Odd psychology on the guy. Though I guess that goes without saying.

• The opposite end of the spectrum in knife skills:

A 61-year-old man was seriously slashed in a battle with a cougar in British Columbia, but managed to kill the animal with his pocket knife, officials said Friday.
The 100-pound cat leaped on Dave Parker from behind Thursday evening as he walked down a road a mile south of Port Alice, a village on Vancouver Island about 230 miles north of Victoria.

Conservation officer Ken Fujino said Parker was being mauled by the adult male but was able to reach his 3-inch knife. Port Alice Mayor Larry Pepper added Parker then slit its throat.
Despite extensive wounds, Parker managed to walk about a mile for help.

Now that is a man. Article about it here with gory pictures of the dead kitty and the knife, if you want to see.

• Nice article about an illegal immigrant dishwasher in LA who found $203,000 and gave it back. He did get a $25,000 reward from the armored car company, and he's not being set upon by deportation agents, but still, many of his friends and relatives are angry and calling him stupid for not keeping it. Funny how many people are eager to brand themselves and totally without honesty or ethics in this article.

• Could Katherine Harris be more incompetent? She did everything possible to ignore the law and hand the election to Bush in the Florida recount, her office totally screwed up this year's balloting process, and now she's had to suddenly resign her job, leaving everyone in the lurch, since she was too stupid to figure out she had to do that in order to run for Senate. That would seem to be rather an obvious conflict of interest; I mean running for office while you are the head of the voting agency. Talk about weasel guarding the hen house.

The really amazing thing is she's running for higher office! As if people didn't have low enough opinions of politicians already. The woman has done everything possible to prove she's unable to even handle her current cushy appointment, and she wants to be in a position of actual importance? I guess in a country where Dan Quayle was a senator and even the Veep, anything is possible, but good lord.

o bands measure up to their names? I had long thought about a few rock bands with names that were utterly inappropriate for their style of music, or else amusingly-ironic given their artistic shortcomings, but for some reason I was totally consumed with the need to write about it yesterday afternoon before work. I spent an hour covering virtually every band in my CD collection, as well as a few dozen others that popped into mind, and I've spent most of the last four hours tying up more and more of them, as well as doing some half-assed research on the Internet. I've now got over 170 bands named, about 150 of which have full entries written about them, and will probably add another hundred or so later today. It will be a site page, pages more likely, given the length. I just need to sort them by type and/or alphabetically, since they are now just in a huge list in the order I thought to type them in.

Initially I was strictly talking about their names, and how well they matched or didn't match their music style or image. As I've gone on I've been putting more into the entries, mostly snarky comments about them, quick summaries of their rise and fall, personal anecdotes, etc. Funny stuff, in theory.

The weird thing is how fast I was cranking them out. It was just an effortless section to write, with new entries coming as fast as I could type them up. I kept thinking of the most obscure bands, bands I knew nothing about, etc, and no matter what, I had theoretically clever comments about all of them just off the top of my head.

Yes, I'm feeling a bit self-congratulatory.

Once the section is up, it will of course be growing by reader input. There are thousands of bands out there, and I'm not planning on listing everyone ever, but I'm sure I'm forgetting dozens of famous ones, and of course ones from types of music I don't really follow. It's much easier to say something funny if I actually know something about the band to be funny about, after all.

As you could probably guess about 3 paragraphs ago, I'm going to quote a few here, just to give you a taste of things. And to fill up the update.

The grading scale is 1-10, with 1 being the least appropriate name, and 10 being one they fully live up to. Most scores are below 7, and there are just a few 1's and 10's thus far, and the grading is even going smoothly. Usually on such a thing you end up having to go back and re-score the first 50 entries, since your scale changes over time, and you realize you were going way too high or low to begin with.

• Bryan Adams -- 5
An eponymous band, if it's even a band; I never heard of anyone in it other than Bryan, so me might have just hired a different set of studio musicians every album/tour, as far as I know. Any artist who chooses to use their own name for their band name tells you something about them, especially when they use their full name. It's popular among country artists. In the case of Bryan Adams, it's a very bland, average name, which pretty well sums up the music. He was slightly-rocking, but mostly just earnest and unremarkable in his early days; in recent years he's apparently gone diving down the wimpy hole Sting fell into, and is doing bad Disney cartoon songs, which costs him a point. Lame though he might be, his name is representative of his sound, so he doesn't get that bad a score. Remember, this is a rating of how well a band's name works, and matches up with their music, not if the music is actually any good or not.

• Morrisey -- 7
The king of the mopey, existential, depressed, arthouse goth style bands of the 80's and early 90's, this guy is probably best known to people today for a short clip of one of his songs that was played on a Beavis and Butthead show, where they speculated that the bandaid he had inexplicably over one nipple was a result of a shaving accident. The band name is hopelessly boring, but since that's the idea, it works for them pretty well.

• W.A.S.P. -- 6
An absurdly over the top hair metal band, with Satanism thrown in purely for marketing reasons. Their name stood for We Are Sexual Perverts, or at least that was the rumor when I was like eight and they were outlaw and cool. These guys were actually about as hardcore as a deep-fried Twinkie, but they'd bite blood packets and wear a lot of hairspray/color, and probably got some kids to think they were evil, which made their music much more appealing, in no small part since it would piss off their parents.

• The Police -- 4
As this was a UK band, I've always wondered if it meant something different there. I mean I'm sure people knew what "police" were in the UK, but is it a common term over there? They call cops over there "bobbies" at times, and if a US band named themselves "The Bobbies" I doubt many US fans would have any clue it meant "The Police". That aside, it's an attention-getting name, but really gives no hint to the style of music.

• AC/DC -- 7
A clever name. Electrical terms, though I always wondered if it was slang for "bi-sexual" at the time they picked it, in the UK. I remember when I was about 10 and mentioned the band name to my mom (they were popular in my school for the Dirty Deeds song) and she laughed and told me what the name meant. I can remember some of the kids who were most into the band (they'd sing the lyrics to Dirty Deeds in the school bus every time we had a field trip anywhere) almost crying when they found out what it meant. Yes, 5th grade, a time when young boys are nearing the summit of homophobia.

• INXS -- 5
Clever name, though it walks the tightrope and risks falling into the land of "way too cutesy". Several of Van Halen's recent albums (OU812, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge) wallow in that swamp already, but there's always room for more. On the down side, INXS repeats the sin of Extreme; picking a name that sounds somewhat hard, while being a poppy marshmellow. I actually liked INXS somewhat, though they got old in a hurry, but that doesn't mean I can excuse their overly-clever band name. The fact that after they were over, their lead singer died of autoerotic asphyxiation is not a bonus point, but it probably should be.

That's five, there are over 140 others done now, and more to come. Whether anyone will ever actually read the page is unknown, but I've enjoyed writing it, thus far.

<-- Yesterday -- Daily Main Page -- Tomorrow -->