Lisa Leads Me to Link reLentlessly

I’m all about links today. Let that be known. So if you’re looking for endless streams of witty remarks … oh, well, I guess there’ll be a few. But mostly links.

First, we must thank Lisa for sending this one, Tar Heel Hip-Hop. Go play Track 12, seriously. Where else will you find lyrics like:

Jackie Man-u-el / you be doin’ it well

or

Let’s hook up at Players / Drink some Holy Grails
A couple pale ales / she’ll be shakin’ her tail

It’s way off the charts as far as unintentional comedy. Now to intentional comedy. Or at least intentional cleverness. This is clearly the most sexually clever ad of all time. In fact, it’s making me a little sad I have a laptop, with one of these stupid touchpads. Let’s move on.

I know I’ve talked about this before, and I promise, I really have nothing against the place, but the Ikea nuts are at it again.

Things get even less normal in outer space, where Saturn has its own Death Star. That’s pretty sweet.

And finally, everybody’s favorite little newsmaker/video slut, Paris Hilton, let her PDA get hacked and now her entire phone book is online! There are some questionable entries in there, like “Fux, Connor.” So is that the dude’s name, or, um, oh nevermind. And who is “Egplant dike ass”? And, more importantly, does she know that’s her name in Paris’ phone book?

Well, I’m done here, so the only real question left is who do I call first, Anna Kournikova or former Guns n’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum? (Are you kidding me – Matt f@%$* Sorum???).

E All You Can E

I have a fever, so bear with me here, but I saw this story today and couldn’t believe it. It’s about how American soldiers traumatized in Iraq and Afghanistan are being given Ecstacy to relieve flashbacks and recurring nightmares.

Hey, that’s cool. I’ve never tried Ecstacy, but it always seems fun when they take a recreational drug and find a medical use for it. Of course, then it only seems like a matter of time before some dilated-pupil trance-dancer is claiming, “Officer, it’s medicinal. You know, for my recurring nightmares."

But I digress. The best paragraph in this story is about how the Ecstacy treatment is administered:

The existing drug-assisted therapy sessions last up to eight hours, during music [sic] is played. The patients swallow a capsule containing a placebo or 125mg of MDMA - about the same or a little more than a typical ecstasy tablet.

Okay, well aside from the fact that they forgot the word “which” in the first sentence there, here’s my beef: Is it just me, or does this therapy sound suspiciously like a rave. I mean, if someone told you they ate some E and then spent the next eight hours listening to music, is the first thought that comes to your head going to be, “Ah, he must have had an army therapy session.” Probably not.

Well, now it’s back to Halls mentho-lyptus therapy for me. Music optional.

I Heart Hartford

On this Valentine’s Day, it seems appropriate to note that this weekend I unexpectedly fell in love – with Connecticut. Well, maybe it was just more of a quality weekend fling. I don’t think I’m looking for any long-term commitment to The Constitution State.

Anyway, here’s why the whole thing went so well. I was in Hartford for the UNC-UConn game, and being that it was a Sunday 1 p.m. job, I was in town from Saturday evening to Monday. Saturday night, we went out in downtown Hartford, which was a surprisingly good time.

At the restaurant where we ate dinner, The Red Plate, the men’s room featured a small string with a ball on the end of it coming from a hole in the wall next to the toilet. A small sign above the string read: “Pull if you need help.” What service! I couldn’t, as I stood preparing to urinate, think of anything I needed “assistance” with (no matter how much I would like to flatter myself). Only in Hartford, I guess.

Sunday night, after the game, Robbi, Jeff and I opted to take a 45-minute ride out to the Mohegan Sun casino to shed some of our white-people guilt (read: cold hard cash). At first, both Robbi and Jeff were hesitant – notably Jeff, who had a 6 a.m. flight back to Greensboro. They had decided we weren’t going, until the following conversation took place in my hotel room.

Me: We don’t have to go, it’s fine.
Jeff: Well, I mean if everyone else wants to, I could be persuaded.
Robbi: Well, if we’re going to go, we should go now.
Me: Let’s do it!

Five minutes later we’re in the car on the way to Uncasville, Connecticut, with only the most marginally sketchy directions on how to get to the casino. But they don’t hide those things. Any place that wants to take your money makes itself easy to find, and 40 minutes later we were on an elevator to the casino floor.

I’ll spare the details of the gambling itself, aside from saying Robbi was very lucky, Jeff was pretty lucky, and I could not be reached for comment. The one fun moment for me, though, was when things turned Swingers-esque. I was drinking Jacks and Cokes (cue Penelope Cruz voice from Vanilla Sky) on the regular at my blackjack table, so the waitress just kept ‘em coming when she happened by each time.

But thanks to a full bladder and a desire to find the Let It Ride tables, we abandoned blackjack and headed across the casino. Part of the way into our journey, the waitress saw me and said, “Hey, aren’t you the Jack and Coke guy?” before handing me another drink.

I tried not to laugh as I thought of the scene in Swingers where the waitress goes into her whole “I carried that stupid Scotch around on my tray for an hour” schtick. Luckily I resisted the impulse to flip her a silver dollar and set up a 6 a.m. rendezvous. But it still would have been nice for someone, anyone, to tell me that I was so money and I didn’t even know it.

An Axe to Grind

This afternoon I was simultaneously excited and disappointed as my new guitar arrived. Before I tell you why, first a little bit about this guitar, or rather, how I came to be expecting it in the first place.

Impulse is a dangerous thing. Like crack. Except you don’t need to find a dealer to get in trouble with impulses. And even if you did, you’d be all, “Hey, I’ll trade you this stereo for some impulse. Don’t worry, it’s not stolen. It’s my Dad’s.” But enough about you.

So on an impulse a couple of weeks ago, I bought a cube of wine at Target. A cube, you ask? Yup. A cube. It is, indeed, in the shape of a cube, and the phrase “cube of wine” sounds so much more dignified than “box of wine.” Even though a cube is a box. Kind of like the way all squares are rectangles, but all rectangles aren’t squares. If they were, Huey Lewis could’ve written a song called “Hip to Be Rectangle.” But he didn’t, so I’ll just get back to the point.

This was an impulse buy, this wine cube. So, no harm done, you say. What’s the problem?

Well, when I was drinking this impulse buy a recent evening, I stumbled upon a near-$500 guitar on sale online for $129.99. And, as they say in the bible, impulse begat impulse (only for “impulse” substitute in some old-school Hebrew names). Buzzed significantly off my impulse wine, I bought an impulse guitar.

So why the disappointment when it arrived? Well, I had two press conferences to cover, and the guitar arrived via UPS literally two minutes before I was set to leave. I didn’t even get to tune the thing before I had to leave for several hours.

It reminded me, all too painfully, of the day I got my first guitar. That axe, a P.O.S. glittery blue nightmare, came into my possession the very night of the Commack Middle School eighth-grade dance. All I could think about as I slow danced to Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” or bounced to “Jump” by Kris Kross was how much I wanted to play my new guitar.

It was the same this time, except substitute a stuffy-nosed Roy Williams for any of the aforementioned craptacular songs. But I survived, got home, plugged in and tuned up, and all was well. And it turned out that maybe these impulses were a good thing, not at all wiggity-wiggity-wiggity-wack.