Pretty much all jump-on-the-grenade material for anything over 40 seconds.
This one has the added bonus of a strong Taliban-like religious message: Women should shut up in church, or something.
Dad punk rock and death metal isn’t any better than Dad classic rock.
All worship church bands are virtually be definition, Dad rock. This one tries to ameliorate the stain by putting motorcycles on the stage of the superchurch tabernacle. Or something like that. Couldn’t get much past the Life in the Fast Lane parts.
My dad rocks harder than your dad, says the description. Aiming low. I like that.
This is accidentally decent. And short. Sadly, it’s the kid who messes it up with enough overenthusiasm to make your neck sweat. If you’re the Dad.
If there was a button to push …
The zenith of Dad rock — rock fantasy camp with Slash.
Dad rock to the max: Playing a Kiss song with Paul Stanley. Dig Dad, looking a little like Bruce Ivins, on the keys.
Sadly, some women lack the usual female wisdom and cleverness which steers them clear of the shoals of Dad rock fantasy camp.
It was a toss-up between what was the more unintentionally hilarious thing on Yahoo this morning, the headline and the hapless editors at the place or the piece on a man named “Allinvain” who’d just had all his Bitcoins — half a million USD’s worth — swiped by malware.
2602 Facebook recommendations, the world arbiter of all that is worth a circle jerk good.
Please don’t indulge the Dads. Dad rock needs to be discouraged.
If you’ve been to Guitar Center even semi-regularly on weekends you’ve suffered through some, if not many, of the annoying aspects of Dad rock.
There’s the Dad who’s buying his little American-branded made-in-China combo amp used in the soft-rock-at-worship on Sunday band.
There’s the Dad who has brought in his acoustic guitar with a couple broken strings because he’s too totally [deleted] to restring and tune it himself.
There’s the Dad at the Pasadena gig who tells you he plays guitar, too, and is now really getting back into it again because the kids are at school.
There are the Dads who want to play their old blues licks or stumble through a classic rock riff for everyone in the showroom.
Possibly the worst — the Dad rock politicians, now seemingly mostly Republicans — doing this gig for advertising.
Back when I ate shoe leather and liked it in Pennsy, the tradition was accordion and polka. If Dad had an old button box he often handed it down to his boy.
This was a big thing, particularly as the accordions were often ornate and beautiful instruments.
Polka is a family tradition, one you can do with your Dad and not be a source of mortification for everyone around you.
There is no rock with Dad. Going to see Kiss or any rock band with Dad may be fun but it’s always lame now, a sign you’ve given it up for the price of a ticket.
I can only imagine how hard it it must be for teenage children in the house when Dad attempts to rock on a newly bought guitar.
Begging to go to Dad rock camp, as in this now ubiquitous commercial for a credit card, is the most patience-trying thing you can do.
Nothing desperately signals “mid-life crisis” and “buyer’s remorse over family” quite like it:
Michael Galpert rolls over in bed in his New York apartment, the alarm clock still chiming. The 28-year-old internet entrepreneur slips off the headband that’s been recording his brainwaves all night and studies the bar graph of his deep sleep … Before he eats his scrambled egg whites with spinach, he takes a picture of his plate with his mobile phone, which then logs the calories. He sets his mileage tracker before he hops on his bike and rides to the office, where a different set of data spreadsheets awaits.
“Running a start-up, I’m always looking at numbers, always tracking how business is going,” he says. Page views, clicks and downloads, he tallies it all. “That’s under-the-hood information that you can only garner from analyzing different data points. So I started doing that with myself.”
His weight, exercise habits, caloric intake, sleep patterns—they’re all quantified and graphed like a quarterly revenue statement.
The founder of his own online company, Galpert is one of a growing number of “self-quantifiers ….”
“I’ve rewired my brain [with smart pills],” [says another ‘self-quantifer’].
[The annoying guy has made it into a product, sharing] his results with the CEOs and venture capitalists he consults with through his executive coaching business, BulletProofExecutive, but he’s found an even more welcoming audience at the first-ever international Quantified Self Conference.
Over the last weekend of May, in the upstairs of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, 400 “Quantified-Selfers” from around the globe have gathered to show off their Excel sheets, databases and gadgets.
Participants are mostly middle to upper class, mostly white …
“I was giving birth to our son, and instead of holding my hand and supporting me and hugging me, [the self-quantifier husband of this poor woman] was sitting in the corner entering the time between my contractions into a spreadsheet,” says Lisa Betts-LaCroix.
You can’t change what you can’t measure, say the “self-quantifiers” in the piece.
It’s true. How do you measure the amount of asshole in your personal composition? The douchebaggery? There’s no machine for it, no way to digitally quantize, no way to visualize it in an .xls file.
But you know it when you see or hear about it.
It’s a dilemma, not being able to change something because you can’t measure it even when you know it must be there.
Here’s a news story from a marginal source that just leaves one speechless.
Scrabbling around in the underbrush for anything that will grab eyeballs, the reporter for something called “io9” whose motto is “We come from the future” does the poisons found in foods thing.
This was a subject of great interest to the neo-Nazi right and survivalists of the Eighties, people who busied themsevles making up samizdat texts on how to poison the IRS auditor or local postal worker with stuff they could find in their kitchen.
The genesis of it was in the idiot’s notion that vanishingly small amounts of toxic chemical moieties in vegetables can somehow be fashioned into weapons.
And with that notion one eventually arrives at the idea that if you just shave enough green stuff off potatoes, you’ll have enough solanine to kill your nosy neighbor or others you suspect are coming for your guns, gold and pemmican supplies. Except there’s never enough.
Like journalist Esther Inglis-Arkell, Bourgass had the fool idea that you could get workable amounts of cyanide from seeds. She just puts this foolishness on a news site; Bourgass actually went to the trouble of collecting cherry stones.
The fruit mentioned isn’t dangerous, but it houses a danger. The seeds [of apricots, cherries and apples], when ground up or even bruised, produces hydrogen cyanide. Yes, the pill that they gave spies to kill themselves if they got captured might have been made from ground-up almonds.
No, now put on the pointy hat and go sit in the corner.
Worse, she tries to drag in ricin, found in castor seeds. Since she doesn’t know that ricin is a protein, she thinks it’s found in castor oil.
Which it isn’t.
You might think you don’t eat these, but you do. They’re most famous for being in castor oil, but they’re also in most sweets like chocolate and processed candies. So what? So they contain ricin … So the next time someone gives you a box of chocolates, it could be that they’re trying to kill you on a day too sunny to carry an umbrella.
One is left speechless at the complete failure of an educational system and the inability to keep the results far away from web publishing.
Ricin detection in food has been a goal of many security businesses, the FDA, and Homeland Security since 9/11.
Google’s Les Paul tribute doodle looks good and sounds little.
A nice idea for a global birthday anniversary that doesn’t capture any of a real guitar’s magic, much less anything made by Les Paul.
I tried it late last night and the problem, as with lots of virtual instruments played with the pointer, is the virtually total lack of expression. You can’t do anything with it that’s remotely like a real guitar. The tonal richness isn’t present. And, of course, there’s no physical contact between the player and the instrument which is what defines the nuance, color and unlimited style of the electric guitar.
That’s all obvious. But still you can’t make it boogie even a little.
You can hear a really lousy stab at — uck — Stairway to Heaven on this thing, here.
You can hear a real Les Paul here in the vid of Cursing the Oilmen (the tone is early Cream although Clapton was more closely associated with the Gibson SG at that point) and here in Hey Cutie.
The other point worth making over Google’s delivery of Les Paul tribute was that electric guitars and, subsequently, rock and roll were an export to the world. Things that made life better; something that made others think highly of us.
It’s a complete reversal, the triumph of evil over good in the national identity.
For more on the phenomenon of antique guitar acquisition as the hobby of poxy wealth speculators, see here.
Teaser lines:
Weekly, features writers find the most annoying examples of Grotesquus Americanus. Then [the newspaper] proceeds to portray whatever herd of manipulators it has found as something swell. The point of it is to make you feel stupid …
Update: Rachel Maddow thinks the Google guitar app is really cool. Empirical proof it has no connection with rock ‘n’ roll or actual guitar music played by human beings.
There’s no crying allowed when you’re from the privileged caste and caught soiling yourself, no coming back from tears of humiliation.
Having said that, this next excerpt — from Politico — seems the standard in celebrity coverage of the ruling class (no link):
[Huma Abedin] has long been considered one of world’s most intriguing women. Stunning, smart, fluent in Arabic and notoriously discreet, she has for the past 15 years had held a firm place in the Clintons powerful orbit, mostly as Hillary Clinton’s “body person.”
There was never a shortage of powerful men drooling over her, and she was considered quite the catch …
