What ever happened to whiplash? In my formative years of the 1980s and early 1990s, you couldn’t watch three consecutive episodes of any sitcom or TV drama without at least one character outfitted in one of those foam neck brace things. The cause of the whiplash was almost certainly a low-speed car accident, and the [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘music’
October 16, 2009
Friday Random 10: Sexy ass fruit flies edition
Scientists in Canadia say they have discovered a way to genetically tweak fruit flies in such a way as to make them utterly irresistible. Not only do fruit flies of the opposite sex flock toward the modified flies, but many of the same sex apparently turn gay for these sexy little monsters.
Professor Joel Levine, who [...]
September 25, 2009
Friday Random 10: Tough Guy Edition
Most people who jog for exercise are carrot-munching weenies, but not Craig O’Brien.
O’Brien is a tough guy. A throwback to a better time — a time when black people knew better than to be president and joggers were free to scream obscenities at whomever the fuck they pleased. Bitch.
So when O’Brien was banned by a [...]
September 18, 2009
Friday Random 10: Astro-pee edition
Becoming an astronaut requires one to possess extraordinary physical and mental capacities. Not only must you be a brilliant and articulate person of science, but you must also endure severe physical challenges that would humble nearly all other humans.
The training program for astronauts is rigorous and largely thankless. Nearly all astronauts spend year after year [...]
August 18, 2009
Wolfgang Mozart has a cold…
The popularity of the 1984 Milos Forman film Amadeus — which was based on the 1979 Peter Shaffer play Amadeus, which was based on the opera Amadeus and Salieri by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, which was based on the short play Amadeus and Salieri by Aleksandr Pushkin — has inspired decades of conspiracy theories and century-spanning amateur [...]
August 17, 2009
Kind of Blue Goes Gray
Pax Arcana
I’m back from yet another research trip to the New Jersey Shore, and while I’m still months from compiling all the data I collected, I think it’s fair to conclude that yes, I will have another Margarita.
My return coincides perfectly with the 50th anniversary of Kind of Blue, the seminal Miles Davis album that [...]
August 6, 2009
David Lee Roth had his reasons
Pax Arcana
In the early 1980s, while Malcolm Jamal Warner was busy making the children of the world cooler, Van Halen was making a reputation for itself as the world’s leader in jackass tour riders.
By now the sight of a superstar band demanding preposterous concessions while on tour is a familiar one. But it all [...]
July 10, 2009
Friday Random 10: Excuses, excuses edition
Pax Arcana
Sorry for the extreme paucity of highbrow musings lately. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the radiant and scrupulous Mrs. Pax Arcana and I are in the process of painting our house — the only human activity that goes from “exciting” and “fun” to “suicidally excruciating” faster than being governor [...]
June 26, 2009
Friday Random 10: Michael Jackson Edition
Pax Arcana
As is so often the case at times of great upheaval, the world now looks to me to make sense of the death of Michael Jackson.
Very well.
Michael Jackson was the capstone of a line of cultural touchstones who bridged the gap between “white” and “black” music. Like Elvis, Otis Redding, and Smokey Robinson before [...]
June 19, 2009
Friday Random 10: Agency Edition
Pax Arcana
During a baseball game my senior year in high school, I made peanut butter on the bench by crushing up a bunch of peanuts under the head of my bat. Later in the game I hit a home run off a particularly renowned pitcher. Every game for the rest of the season I made [...]
