Variety Amateur Hour

Like I was tellin' Ricky Saturday,

Salons: people with bad haircuts giving people bad haircuts.

Also, has any guy ever gotten a good haircut? I don't think that has ever happened.

How much would you have to pay an NFL official to celebrate along with that team that just scored the touchdown?

Beyonce is the hottest woman ever and the Single Ladies video is conclusive evidence.

I think I tried sometime last year to get people all worked up about Fishers. Consider this the Fisher revival.
Facts about Fishers

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Family: Mustelidae
Genus: Martes
Species: Martes pennanti
Makes noises like: the squeal of a baby placed naked on its back on a cold rock with a pipin' hot BBQ skewer shoved in its foot.
Its teeth are so sharp that: it can enter your house by chewing through your foundation.

Milwaukee is a segregated city. The anecdotes and statistics in this article are difficult to stomach, but I suppose it would be naiive of me to be surprised. Neighborhoods there are homogeneous. I experienced an instance of this when I went to an art show on the South side in a Latino area. We saw some interactive video installations done by UW-Milwaukee art students, and there were some inspired projects. The art department has some nice display areas. This one was the lobby of an apartment building with white plaster and pale limestone walls. Anyway, we left the show and wandered the neighborhood in search of a tavern. We stopped to spend a few minutes basking in stony-white, twice reflected light - once off of the moon, which was full, and then off an old limestone church. Unadulterated light. Don't-make-them-like-that-anymore churches abound in Milwaukee. A tavern's red neon lights were barely visible two blocks down a sidestreet. It looked like a brothel. And we expected to be the only three white dudes there. Turns out we were the only three white dudes there, but there wasn't a hostile crowd giving us the eye: there wasn't a crowd. There were three 45-50 year old women and an older male bartender, who was Colombian. He nursed from an enormous mug aggressively. On two non-plasma roundscreen TVs, numerous scantily clad Latina vixens gyrated. There was a small wood floor for dancing, and two of the women would dance drunkenly while the other sat at the bar and smoked. After a few minutes, the sitter would tap in and a dancer would take a break. There was a disco ball and several sets of primary colored lights adorned the corners of the ceiling. We talked with the bartender, who was hard of hearing (initially we thought he didn't speak English). Apparently he just opened the bar two weeks ago and only keeps it open on Fridays from like 5-11 pm. Hell yeah, just give 'em what they need: them's the glory hours of any week! The bottom line is, this bar is fucking tight and I wish I lived in Milwaukee so I could go there every single Friday. A Miller Lite bottle was $3 though. Kind of weak.

This has been a heartbreaking season for the Green Bay Packers.

I really like this video. I saw it on Sasha Frere-Jones' website. I think this band reminds me of a hybrid Kings of Leon (when they were good) and The Libertines.

EDIT: Whoa I didn't realize this band was a little bit older than I thought. Formed in 1999, albums in '03, '05, '06, '07.

2ND EDIT: I still stand by A.R.E. Weapons - "Fuck What You Like," but either I don't get the irony or their song about Times Square is terrible.

Also, French Horn Rebellion are tight! You gotta watch their videos - the songs themselves don't do the guys justice. They're from Milwaukee but apparently they live in Brooklyn a.k.a. the center of the entire fucking Universe.

"the holy slow train" -- b. dylan

Suckers bringing the realness at the RNC in St. Paul:

"If you 'just tripped,' why are you pepper-spraying Jeff?"

Lindsay "Warhol Recursion" Lohan still exists. From Wikipedia:

Lohan has yet to comment on the exact nature of their relationship, stating through her publicist that she "wants to keep her private life private." When pressed by a paparazzo to deny the rumors, Ronson responded, "Are you retarded?"

Things that make that much sense:

Paparazzo: "Deny the rumors!"
George Clooney: "Am I hungry?"

Paprazzo: "Deny the rumor!"
Lisa Kudrow: "What is a quark?"

Paprazzo: "Deny a rumor!"
Winston Churchill: "Come here often?"

Two great album titles, one deep-sounding-because-we're-French-and-half-literate song title, and the my favorite band name ever:

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
Everything All the Time
Everything Is Everything
Girls Are Short

In conclusion, Michael Johnson looks like a haggard Eddie Murphy, Tony Stewart looks like a fat John Cusack, and it is hilarious to spend a year smoking up every day and getting super fat before getting completely over it and regular-size again. That must be the biggest perk of being young and male.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Fact: Alaska's state motto is "North to the Future." That is the second-best state motto after "Live Free or Die" (Nü Hampshire). The worst is Ohio's---"With God, All Things are Possible" ---because it is not true. ("Cincinnati? Do you mean Cincifratty Brohibro?" "...No."). HILARIOUS.

Mission Impossible Two, oh my God: people take off their faces in that movie like you and I walk down stairs (not that often, but with an air of aggressive 'of course'). The stressed characters (all of them; calm down Tom Cruise!) rub their temples and then, as if an afterthought, un-face. Dept. of Come On: director John Woo also made Face/Off. Some kinda formative childhood trauma he must've had. Then again, MI2 came out in 2000, when websites still asked you if you wanted Frames. The past is a foreign country: they face the future less figuratively there.

The word 'aggressive' is soon to join 'random' and 'awkward' in the graveyard of killing overuse. The millions of guilty will face no jury. 'Absurd' is endangered.

"Not at all" is a bizarre way to say "You're welcome."

"Thank you."
"No! Nooo!"

"Fuck you, fuck your fuckin' pizza, and fuck Frank Sinatra." Casting an Italian guy as a pizza shop owner is like casting a black guy as a criminal or inmate.

"Okay, get in the cell. Nice. Also, there is no movie."

--America

This post being a hodgepodge, I will tell you that Thousands's Ricky sent my family a thank-you sausage after crashing at our house. The packaging says this: "ARE YOU KIDDING ME? That's the best summer sausage I've ever had!"

Ricky, everyone: I am not kidding you.