The Infamous Case Race Incident

And now time for a personal story. For privacy's sake, I've changed the names of everyone involved.

The following took place on September 4th, 2009. I typed this up in my iPhone, being the only one sober in the whole apartment. Minor edits for clarity and grammar were made, as well as many clarification notes as necessary.

A little background on this night: We had decided the week before to have a case race within the apartment, Maverick and Irish vs. Me and Data. However, I backed out so my voice would be good for auditions that week. Thus, Data was partnered with Irish's friend Beardog, who is roughly 6'3" and no slouch to drinking.

He was fucked and didn't even know it. Data has the alcoholic tolerance of a 4 year old who was born without a liver. Maverick and Irish, seasoned alcoholics, clearly have no problem with this. The events that followed are recorded thus. The race began roughly at 8:30 pm.


5 minutes in:
Data finishes beer number one. He begins muttering obscenities.

12 minutes in:
Data is slurring his words and can't control his volume. He hasn't yet finished his 3rd.

20 minutes in:
Data can't feel his face. He's on his 4th beer.

28 minutes in:
Data thinks it's funny to pretend he's about to vomit. I don't appreciate the humor somehow.

29 minutes in:
Data can't walk a straight line. He is on the middle of his fifth beer.

31 minutes in:
Data playing with a knife. Needless to say, we give it to Irish for the rest of the night. He's still on his fifth.

33 minutes in:
I offhandedly comment that Tulsa is dominating Tulane (the football game of the night). Data responds with "NO SHIT SHERLOCK." He follows his up with the statement he doesn't want to drink anymore.

This might have been a good idea. He's still on his fifth.

35 minutes in:
Data is slapping his face on beat with the music. He continues this for nearly a minute.

He's still on his fifth.

39 minutes in:
Data tries to lock me outside for the second time tonight.

He's still on his fifth.

43 minutes in:
Data is giggling uncontrollably. It reaches deafening pitch...yes, he is still on his fifth.

48 minutes in:
Data officially starts his 6th. Forget walking, he's having problems sitting up straight. He starts playing with Maverick's empty cans.

53 minutes in:
Data is lying on the ground. I have photographic evidence. He says he thinks he just lost a brain cell.

59 minutes in:
I take one celeb beer for Data. He is yelling about how he can't do this anymore and how he's drunker than an Irish priest. Also, "CHICKEN’S DONE." Data stops drinking.

One hr 3 minutes:
Data is taking a shower. He wants to get ready for the party we're going to later.

1 hour 10 minutes in:
Data emerges. He's wearing an orange polo and dress pants. He's still not drinking. He fucks up the lyrics to Barney's "I Love You" song.

1 hr12 minutes:
Maverick and Irish win. Data says he can't see his eyes.

Final tally for the race: Maverick and Irish: 12 each. Beardog: 10/11. Data: 6. Me: 1. Now, keep this in mind for the rest of the story.

After the race, we decide to head out to Rabbi President’s B-day party.

Irish won't shut up about how they won. Maverick is still drinking and pisses next to his car. They try to tip a car.

We make it to the party without incident. Data starts drinking again. He has 4 beers
before we leave party.

After we leave, I start recording by time code.

11:15 Maverick falls down a hill. He can't get up. We find this hilarious.

11:20 Irish high fives a random guy he calls "token black guy." He appears to be cool with that, so no problem.

11:25 Irish begins to yell "Hey Sugar" at everyone we pass.

11:27 We pass two cops at the bus stop. Maverick is stumbling into the road. The cops just laugh.

11:29 Maverick trips over his shoes. Twice.

11:31 Maverick and Irish pee behind a bush and discuss getting home and getting Data's "wet wet." I'll leave this to your imagination.

11:40 We arrive at the party. Irish mans the keg. Maverick bums a broken cigarette and Data continues drinking.

11:55 "A stupid bitch pisses me off."

I put this in quotes because this is all I typed, but here's a quick rundown of what happened. Maverick, having not enjoyed his broken cigarette, asks me to help him find another. I turn and start asking a few people, and this girl in a red dress behind me responds with "Go, or don't go."

This confuses me. That has nothing to do with the question I asked. I respond with, "Excuse me?" only to get another reply of "Go, or don't go." This time, she gestures to the house. I realize she thinks I'm trying to enter the house (we're on the back porch in an Ashby apartment).

I say, "Oh, no. I'm asking if any of you have a cigarette my friend can-"

As I try to finish my sentence, this vile tramp cuts me off and says, "No. Now go, or don't go."

After this, it is only thanks to my sobriety I didn't emotionally cripple her in front of her friends. I decide it's time for us to go. Irish waits around for his girlfriend at the time as Data (who is terrifyingly almost sober by now) and I escort Maverick back to Southview.

12:00 Maverick falls and hits his face. Let me clarify this statement; Maverick faceplanted into a concrete sidewalk. Why? Well, it turns out the drinking gods have a sick sense of humor and transferred Data's drunkenness to Maverick. I have firm grip on his shoulder for most of the walk back. He tells me he's fine, and since he hasn't stumbled since we left, I make the mistake of believing him. As I let go of him, I turn to Data to ask about something and I am quickly interrupted by a resounding smack. I turn back around to see Maverick, face against the pavement, legs straight up in the air. For a moment, I thought he was trying to do a "baby freeze," or whatever the fuck that break dance move is, then remembered "Oh shit your friend is hammered." We got a hold of him after he made it back to his feet, stumbled through several bushes and smacked into the side of a building.

12:15 We miraculously make it back. Seriously, I was completely surprised we succeeded.

1:00 Irish and his girlfriend return. She chastises me and Maverick for being home so early. I explain I'm sober for the weekend. Maverick thought she was some other girl that Irish brought home. She proceeds to inform Irish that if he thinks he is getting sex he is mistaken. Irish counters by picking her up and dragging her into the room and closing the door.

And a good time was had by all! Anyhow, this was a long time ago but in the future be on the lookout for a hopeful part two installment.

Jason DeRulo And The Chamber of Stolen Music

I'm sure most of anyone today would recognize the name Jason DeRulo. For those of you who don't, here are a few pictures to jog your memory.

To be honest, I had no idea what he looked like until I started writing this blog.

This picture shows DeRulo is taller than a Fender...not necessarily that he knows what it is.

Jason DeRulo first entered the public eye in 2009 with his hit single, "Whatcha Say," which he then followed in the next year with "In My Head" and "Riding Solo," all off of his first eponymous album (he named it after himself to make sure he wouldn't forget his name). DeRulo is one of many in a recent string of artists who likes to use Auto-tune/vocoders to sing 2000 harmonies at once and slide like they covered the treble clef with baby oil.

I thought I'd take a second and analyze the popular music my boy Jay-Jay has produced. First off, let's examine his breakout hit, "Whatcha Say." If you have ever listened to decent music, or you're a teenage girl who happens to love The O.C. (like if you're my roommate and happen to own an entire season on DVD, you know who you are), then you have probably heard the song that he samples.

This Summer, Shia LaBeouf will act better than you've ever seen him act before...maybe.

Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" is a classic song that teaches kids how to actually use a vocoder and the proper art of multiple voice harmony. "Whatcha Say" steals one of the best parts of the song and turns it into a call and answer session. "Hide and Seek" is about...well honestly, I don't know. I've been over the lyrics a dozen times and the music video is no help at all. What matters is that it kicks ass. "Whatcha Say," on the other hand, is clearly about J-Dog pleading his ex-girlfriend to get back with him after he blatantly cheated on her, and his only reason is that he's going to be so famous that he can buy her anything. How romantic. It's also one of a few songs that has been replaced as the number one Hot 100 billboard song in America by the song it displaced ("Fireflies" by Owl City. Ouch JayBone. Ouch).

The second song that we're going to cover is his current popular track, "In My Head." Some of you may have been confused the first time you heard it. "Isn't that Lady Gaga?" you might have asked, as you hopefully prepared to jam out to the epic collaboration between Stephanie Germanotta (How many of you had to look up the name to know who I was talking about?), Akon (Aliune Thiam? OK seriously does anyone use their own names anymore?), and Colby O'Donis Colon (I hate you all). But instead of getting "Just Dance," you start hearing the power of Auto-tune as our good old boy J-Money starts singin' his new fiery tribute to women. What's this particular piece of music theft about, you ask? Rape. In a Club. That he is imagining.

Ooh baby, I'm gonna pretend I'm commitin' a felony on youuuu baby!

For those of you wondering what I'm talking about, here are a few selected lyrics from the song:

"Everybodys looking for love. Oh. Oh.
Aint that the reason youre at this club. Oh. Oh.
You aint gonna find a dance with him. No. Oh.
Got a better solution for you girl. Oh. Oh."

So in these first verses, Jason establishes that people come to clubs for "love," which for the younger audience, is a euphemism for SEX. He offers a "better solution" to this mysterious him this girl is dancing with, and I can only assume its Jason himself. He drops the sweet line "Youll see a side of love you've never known," which probably is his throwback line when he's hitting up clubs tryna run bitches down.

It then follows up with :

"In my head, I see you all over me.
In my head, you fulfill my fantasy."

At first, this seems like it's a relatively normal song about club hookups, but a few things you might have noticed that there's a lot of personal pronouns being used in the chorus. It's not about what this girl wants, it's ALL Jason here. That said, it still seems like its a legitimate song (with just Jason being a typical asshole looking for his own satisfaction) until he takes it to the next level with this gem:

"Youll be screaming no.
In my head, its going down."

Again, in theory this could just be Jason saying that he'll be so good that she'll be screaming out, but then in the second verse:

"Some dudes know all the right things to say.
When it comes down to it, its just a game.
Instead of talking let me demonstrate. Yeah.
Get down to business lets skip foreplay."

Apart from the first acknowledgment that he's just playing this chick as part of the game (which lead to my conclusion of the use of love in the opening line of the song), he intends to just go straight to railing this girl with warming up. This fact, combined with he wants her to be screaming "no" do not lead to the conclusion that that scream is about her being wowed by his sexual prowess.

Oh baby, I just loved the way you treated me like a hole in a seedy club bathroom wall.

In Jason's final song, "Ridin' Solo," which at first sounds like his most original piece of work to date. In fact, the only reason it is remotely close to original is because he failed to steal "Bittersweet Symphony" from The Verve. This symphony, however, is about our good old boy JD not being weighed down by his apparently overbearing girlfriend (or girlfiend, as he would have us believe) and now he can go back to wearing his sunglasses at night. Cause he's so tight. Altogether, Jason DeRulo doesn't seem to have much talent as a musician.

Doing a little research on DeRulo yielded some interesting information, however. According to the ruler of the internet, Wikipedia, Jason Joel Desrouleaux (SERIOUSLY??) has "been performing since the age of five. He wrote his first song, "Crush on You", at age eight and was heard singing part of the song on a Galaxy FM interview. Derülo spent his youth studying opera, theater, and ballet. He attended Dillard Center for the Arts in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York."

This schmuck has been a musician since he was a little kid, and he pushes out crap songs like this? Mozart is shitting his pants in heaven right now. How is this even close to being allowable by the Universe? I guess he ended up trying to keep up with the times...after all, every artist is doing it nowadays. For example:

Katy Perry
California Gurls = September by Earth, Wind, and Fire. Except about frosting beaches and Candy Cane pimps or whatever. By the way, the only time that the music video shows that it's aware of the lyrics is when a anthropomorphic popsicle dies a melty death.

Sweet, delicious murder.

Sometimes artists copy each other because they decided to have someone else write their music For example, some of you might have heard of Ryan Tedder, the lead singer of OneRepublic. Since the start of his career, he's also been helping other artists write their music. Every now and again though, he gets a little lazy. He helped both Beyonce and Kelly Clarkson write some smash hits ("Halo" and "Already Gone"). After they came out, our girl Sasha Fierce and recently converted Beluga whale Kelly began to notice they sounded a HELL of a lot alike. Like "didn't I just release this song" alike. And as always when people cheat, they get caught and punished with two Grammy nominations.

My personal favorites are when artists end up copying themselves. In the olden days, when people still could tolerate Nickelback without crying, they were actually relatively popular. I mean they didn't have the ability to press horseshit into a CD with record-breaking sales, but they could hold their own. That having been said, they pulled a little trick called "we're going to write one of our hit songs backwards and not have people notice." And by write, I mean literally, they took their number one hit song "How You Remind Me" and turned the melody around to get "Someday", which was number 7 on the U.S. Top 100, and number 1 in Canada. Look at you showing favoritism, America's hat!

Of course, America's bands weren't to be outdone on the musical douchebaggery scale, so Massachusetts Punk-Emo-Bitches-Whateverthehell band Boys Like Girls decided that instead of altering one of their hit songs, they would simply write it all over again. "The Great Escape" was a decent song (only hit 23rd on the billboard) but two singles later, "LoveDrunk," off of the similarly titled album, apparently fooled everybody because it was actually placed higher in the charts (22nd!). People eventually realized that they'd heard the song before, but somehow couldn't figure out what it had copied. Then, it hit them! The Killers!

You are under my spell...listen to my music!

Apparently these clowns are masters of hypnosis, because they managed to make everyone think they actually did something less self centered and stole another bands music.

Anyhow, it's kind of a roundabout way of saying this, but the point of all this is that musicians get lazy, thieving, and uncreative once they join the industry. Support creativity, advance the arts, and only use Jason DeRulo for grinding beats when your hammered and nothing else.

And so it begins

Welcome to the new blog page! In this issue, we'll be discussing the final episode of the first season of Glee.

First off, as epic a reversal of expectations as having the New Directions team not win, Vocal Adreneline was fucking terrible. And I guarantee that it has nothing to do with the fact that the entire scene was overlaid with Quinn giving birth. Fact of the matter is, Queen is an amazing band. Bohemian Rhapsody is an incredible song, and vocal ensembles are uniquely suited to make it the sexiest thing since Freddie Mercury's mustache.

Second sexiest thing: Tom Selleck's

However, instead of making this song into the usual Glee style orgasmic covering of a musical classic, we end up with Jesse St. James (Jonathan Groff) belting his face off for 4-ish long ass minutes. While I am impressed by Groff's absurd range (granted you can just taste the autotune), all he does is sing at blastissimo volume, as does the rest of his choir. For those of you who wonder what blastissimo is, it's when a singer is performing at a volume somewhere between the loudest normal human beings can sing and the sound a cannon makes when you fire it. It's acceptable for some instances, like the high point of the most epic song ever. It's not acceptable for full time usage during a song that starts off so quietly. Overall, I felt that instead of making an incredible tribute to one of the greatest bands of the last century, it ended up being this ode to the future spawn of Quinn Fabray.

New Directions, on the other hand, did a mashup of some of the best songs Journey has to offer. Apart from featuring multiple soloists, including Santana (Naya Rivera), who doesn't get featured enough as a soloist, they actually figured out how to use dynamics in a musical context. On top of that, Mercedes (Amber Riley) starts belting her face off during Don't Stop Believin' straight into a never heard before key change. In. Fucking. Credible.

Here a few more things I thought about watching this episode:

1. The women of New Directions seem to take hair fashion advice from Snooki.

During the competition, I couldn't help but notice that all the girls hair had very similar shapes to it, like all of their skulls were misshapen and had protruding growths at the back. At first I was confused, did the New Directions ladies suddenly all grow massive tumors?

Over-exposure to the awesomeness of Lea Michele's voice has been known to cause cancer.

Soon after I realized that the reason their hair was, in fact, altered not by malicious growths but little devices known as "Bump-its." I was relatively unfamiliar with this particular product and its purpose (other than the late night commercials I've seen during states of questionable sobriety), so I decided to do a little research on this strange plastic contraption. It would seem the purpose of these Bump-its is to make thin haired women appear to be sporting absurd lock volume, but they can be used by any and all women for massive hair illusion. Either way, I've never seen these on a real live person before, but I have seen it used on small cave trolls (these ones don't grant you wishes).

For God's sake don't make eye contac-FUCK too late.

2. Will Schuester has the subtlety of a rapist.

In the penultimate moment of the season finale, buggy-eyed neurotic Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays) is protesting the disbanding of Glee club following their unnecessary defeat. Will (Matthew Morrison) notices this and strikes up a conversation to the tune of "YOU'RE DOING THIS BECAUSE YOU LOVE MEEE ARARARARGH!"

How can you say no to this face?

Now, as an avid fan of the show, I am of course aware of the sordid history between the two teachers, starting with Will mind-cheating on his wife with her and Emma agreeing to marry portly football coach Ken Tanaka (Patrick Gallagher) and then mind-cheating on him with Will and then both breaking off their marriages and then getting together, and then Will ACTUALLY cheating on her with Rachel's mom (Idina Menzel, I could honestly care less about her character name) and then they almost sleep togaehotiydsflknagoisklf and so on and so forth. Thing is, earlier in the episode, Emma reveals she has an offscreen boyfriend (GASP). So whats the first question our dear old Will asks? He wants to know if Captain Dentistry and his deer-in-the-headlights face flame have done the beast with two backs. Classy.

Anyhow, fast-forwarding into the end of the episode, after Emma vehemently denies that it's about him, Will decides to blatantly ignore her and goes for the rape kiss. Honestly, I wouldn't have been anymore terrified of him if he wore a blanket, put on lipstick, and danced around naked saying "Would you fuck me? I'd fuck me."

IT STOPS TALKING OR IT GETS THE HOSE.

The only thing that probably saved Emma from Will wearing her skin was the timely intervention of the students singing a terribly sad song. Rachel cockblocking: 1, Will getting any from someone other than his wife in this series: 0.

Well, that's all for the first edition of CapsLock is for Emphasis. Tune in next time for a discussion about Jason DeRulo and when recording artists like to steal music.

P.S. Quinn is now officially a MILF. Good day.