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March 21, 2005 |
Jefferson City, MO COURTESY OF THE INTERNET A time-saving collage of the games that may be inspiring easily- influenced criminals to act like themselves he sound of big, scary men whining grew louder this week with the news that the Missouri House (similar to the Ronald McDonald House, only more Missoury) has upheld state governor Matt Blunt's decision to ban all video games from the state's prisons. While the public's reaction has been mostly along the lines of "They have video games in prison? Is there anything those assholes don't have?" the reaction from inmates statewide has been much bitchier.
"Man, this shit is whack," complained Tyrell Doogins, convicted three-time murder and NBA LIVE fanatic. "If I can't get my GTA on, I gonna be killin' some suckers for real."
The move by Blunt came after months of criticism by victim's-rights groups disturbed by the prospect of prisoners reliving their rea...
he sound of big, scary men whining grew louder this week with the news that the Missouri House (similar to the Ronald McDonald House, only more Missoury) has upheld state governor Matt Blunt's decision to ban all video games from the state's prisons. While the public's reaction has been mostly along the lines of "They have video games in prison? Is there anything those assholes don't have?" the reaction from inmates statewide has been much bitchier.
"Man, this shit is whack," complained Tyrell Doogins, convicted three-time murder and NBA LIVE fanatic. "If I can't get my GTA on, I gonna be killin' some suckers for real."
The move by Blunt came after months of criticism by victim's-rights groups disturbed by the prospect of prisoners reliving their real-life criminal exploits, and earning gaudy high scores for doing so, through such violent games as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Hitman: Contracts.
But not all inmates agree with that line of reasoning.
"Man, that shit is so fake," bitched lifer Tug Borrows. "That gun doesn't recoil anything like that, this game is for pussies."
Prison officials have also accused some popular titles, like Acclaim's Prison Riot and Rockstar's Shower Shiv 2 of instigating real-life violence within the state's correctional facilities.
"It's the age-old question of art imitating life, or life imitating art," explained cultural critic and perpetual college student Justin Blake. "Just because two inmates drop their controllers and get into a knife fight in the middle of playing Eidos' Prison Rec Room Knife Fight Gold Edition, it's impossible to say if the game caused that behavior, or if Eidos just did a good job getting the details right. After all, that kind of stuff went on long before they had video games in prisons. They used to blame that old Gregory Peck movie, Change That Channel and I Break Your Face for the same kind of things."
While highly violent games like Grand Theft Auto and Max Payne are by far the most popular in America's prisons, there do remain small pockets of gaming inmates dedicated to non-violent titles, who feel like they're being unfairly punished by the total ban of all video game types.
"Sure, not a lot of guys in the joint are as into Roller Coaster Tycoon as I am," admitted Dolmer Grays, a diminutive and heavily-bruised inmate in Jefferson City. "But there are enough of us. And any time we're not running away from the bigger and tougher inmates, you can find us playing RCT, baby."
Dolmer had to cut the interview short to escape retribution from a GTA fan, but his point was well-taken. However, it remains this reporter's position that Dolmer and other fans of pussy video games should spend a little more time in the gym and a little less time on the Xbox if they hope to outrun a beatdown more successfully than Dolmer did.
This reporter also received word of a small but dedicated pocket of Dance Dance Revolution fans in the Jefferson City facility, but was advised by the warden to stay out of that cell block if I valued my anus, which this reporter does. The commune news takes civil liberties seriously, especially when it comes to video games, pornography, and denying people we don't like the right to vote. the commune's Ivan Nacutchacokov, while usually our go-to guy for the foreign beat, is occasionally also a perfect fit for domestic stories that include a high likelihood of being shived, shot, or shot in the shiv hole.
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Appeals Court Rules Hilton Legitimately Too Pretty to Survive Prison Climatologists Cross Legs Uncomfortably at Mention of Bangkok Conference Merck: “Crazy-Ass Brazil Giving AIDS Drugs to People With No Money” Poison Probe Reveals 90% of Packaged Foods Actually Dog Food |
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 October 29, 2001
Fortune 5Growing up with snowflake, one learned to drink their sap in the morning. There was no time for globe-girdling as we chased the bears though the jungle of oil refineries, then were eaten like pudding by Lyndon B. Johnson. "Let's get away from the sea!" I remember thinking. Robin sails home to tell the tale. "May this car bring you happiness," he begins. "It's rotunda is all you expect Japan to be. The sky is our home. The earth is our winding path. As the wheel spins, the pot forms clarified butter." Robin always speaks of butter as a mother would. He's prone to dream of beautiful maiden cats and lovely lands. He hates the sea. He says snowflake is too heavy for most tree limbs to support. Once again, he is right. Get a shovel.
You will find yourself at war with the sea. Try again...
º Last Column: Fortune 4 º more columns
Growing up with snowflake, one learned to drink their sap in the morning. There was no time for globe-girdling as we chased the bears though the jungle of oil refineries, then were eaten like pudding by Lyndon B. Johnson. "Let's get away from the sea!" I remember thinking. Robin sails home to tell the tale. "May this car bring you happiness," he begins. "It's rotunda is all you expect Japan to be. The sky is our home. The earth is our winding path. As the wheel spins, the pot forms clarified butter." Robin always speaks of butter as a mother would. He's prone to dream of beautiful maiden cats and lovely lands. He hates the sea. He says snowflake is too heavy for most tree limbs to support. Once again, he is right. Get a shovel.
You will find yourself at war with the sea. Try again later. º Last Column: Fortune 4º more columns
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|  April 1, 2002
Who Put the Bomp in the Bomp-Ba-Bomp-Ba-Bomp?It's a question that I get asked on a nearly daily basis, and understandably: just what in the hell was wrong with American music in the 1950's? History has it that the 1960's were the decade of recreational and experimental drug use, citing such examples of delusionary flakery as Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, The Beatles' I Am the Walrus and Gregg Allman's hair. And while I wouldn't argue against these as prime examples of pharmaceutical excess, they pale mightily in comparison to the near-psychotic mutant trend of late-50's doo-wop music. John Lennon may have envisioned Mean Mr. Mustard dripping from a dead dog's eye, but even this game of Clue gone horribly wrong looks downright pedestrian next to a jabbering psychopath questioning who exactly put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.
Like a drugged-up visitor from deep space, doo-wop appeared seemingly out of nowhere, holing up in the chests of America's great pop stars in the late 50's and early 60's. From this parasitic enclave it communicated with the world through a bewitching combination of di-dits, bompa-bomps, ding-dangs, shooby-doos and doh-dohs. Why did it come, and what was it hoping to communicate to us? Nobody knows, though our best guess is that it had to do with seeking therapy for a stuttering problem.
The earliest known recording of the mutant doo-wop style was the Orioles' 1948 tune It's Too Soon To Know. During the recording of what was, by all reports,...
º Last Column: Make Mine Nougat º more columns
It's a question that I get asked on a nearly daily basis, and understandably: just what in the hell was wrong with American music in the 1950's? History has it that the 1960's were the decade of recreational and experimental drug use, citing such examples of delusionary flakery as Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, The Beatles' I Am the Walrus and Gregg Allman's hair. And while I wouldn't argue against these as prime examples of pharmaceutical excess, they pale mightily in comparison to the near-psychotic mutant trend of late-50's doo-wop music. John Lennon may have envisioned Mean Mr. Mustard dripping from a dead dog's eye, but even this game of Clue gone horribly wrong looks downright pedestrian next to a jabbering psychopath questioning who exactly put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.
Like a drugged-up visitor from deep space, doo-wop appeared seemingly out of nowhere, holing up in the chests of America's great pop stars in the late 50's and early 60's. From this parasitic enclave it communicated with the world through a bewitching combination of di-dits, bompa-bomps, ding-dangs, shooby-doos and doh-dohs. Why did it come, and what was it hoping to communicate to us? Nobody knows, though our best guess is that it had to do with seeking therapy for a stuttering problem.
The earliest known recording of the mutant doo-wop style was the Orioles' 1948 tune It's Too Soon To Know. During the recording of what was, by all reports, a fairly normal song, lead singer Sonny Til suffered the massive variety of nervous breakdown and began singing rhyming gibberish vaguely related to his ex-wife winning custody of their home and the recent transmission failure of his Oldsmobile. Fearing for their own lives, the band continued to play and discovered to their dismay that when they had finished the take they were at the end of their studio time. As was a common practice at the time, the record company had only secured them ten minutes of recording time to record and mix the song, and they'd had to sell bass player Johnny Reed's virginity in the process as they were obligated to pay for the studio time themselves.
Low on options and wary of bat-wielding record company thugs, the band played it cool, acting as if the recording session had gone fine. The record was released as-is by record company execs who were so outside of the loop that they once released a recorded armpit fart as a single, snookered by an engineer with a sense of humor. Back in that day all of the record companies were so desperate for a hit they would release anything, sometimes even recordings of other records held up to a microphone, as the execs in charge all listened to marching bands and had no clue what the record-buying teens of the day were into. They seldom listened to the records they put out, which led to the infamous "My Ding-a-Ling" scandal of 1972.
It's Too Soon To Know wasn't a huge hit, but it sold surprisingly well considering the totally bugshit nature of the vocals. It also proved to be heavily influential for a young aspiring songwriter named Richard Lewis, who crashed his car into a grocery store the first time he heard it on the radio. Many say Lewis never recovered psychologically from the incident, but he did go on to form The Silhouettes, and pen the 1957 mega-hit Get a Job. That song introduced the stuttering, nonsensical vocal stylings that came to be known as doo-wop to the world.
Some purists and historians have argued that Get a Job was only a hit because Lewis' uncle owned the Junior Records label and made sure the song was played on Dick Clark's American Bandstand, which guaranteed it would be a hit among the easily-led youth of the day. Others might disagree, but the success of the 1959 hit Dog Barking in the Back Alley seems to lead credence to the theory, since the rare sound-effects single likely would not have reached #1 if it had not been featured on American Bandstand earlier that year.
Whatever the reason, Get a Job was a smash single, and Americans were quick to concede that if it's what everyone else was listening to, then they were into lyrics like "Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma" and colossally embarrassing bass singers, too.
Other bands smelled the money train and were quick to follow, solidifying doo-wop as a legitimate musical movement and a bad name for a hair salon. Not long after, The Marcels released the doo-wop manifesto Blue Moon in 1961, daring America to make sense of their statement of purpose: "Bom bom ba-bom ba-bom ba-bom bom ba-dang a lang lang a ding a dang ding Blue Moon…"
But by late 1961 doo-wop was beginning to lose it's luster, beginning with Barry Mann's hit Who Put the Bomp?, at which point fans began to suspect that the magic was gone and that doo-wop artists were just bullshitting them now. What began as a street movement had been exploited to the limits of credibility, and all of the bomps and sha-na-na's had begun to ring hollow.
By 1964 doo-wop was a mere ghost on the American musical landscape, as record-buyers turned away from the bubblegum of their youth and embraced the British Invasion of more vital artists, replacing their embarrassing Shep and The Limelites platters with the more mature pleasures of Manfred Mann's Do Wah Diddy Diddy. The rest, as they say, is history. º Last Column: Make Mine Nougatº more columns
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Quote of the Day“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our capacity for customer service. Yes I'll hold.”
-Elvin EinschwartzFortune 500 CookieYou will find Love in a new job this week. Unfortunately it's Courtney Love, and she's your second-shift supervisor. Cheer up, it's not that nobody cares about you; it's just that nobody's willing to admit to it. Everyone's right: Your irrational hatred of the Chinese is starting to hurt your chopstick business. This week's lucky stars: Sirius, Orion, Omega 13, Pauley Shore.
Try again later.5 Phrases Guaranteed to Get You Slapped| 1. | My testicles feel funny. Do they feel funny to you? | | 2. | You're very pretty. For a man, I mean. | | 3. | Why don't you go back to the kitchen and sit on this egg until it's hatched, bitch. | | 4. | If anyone wants to suck my cock, laugh awkwardly. | | 5. | Our greatest mistake as a country was fighting to keep Texas (Texas only) | |
|   North Korea Pissed Their Real-Life Hunger Games Nowhere Near as Popular as Movie BY Orson Welch 1/17/2005 It's a new year, readers, and a new chance to decimate our low standards until they've reached rock bottom—then again, our nation has made Adam Sandler and Ashley Judd both millionaires. Is there much further left to go? Bah, humbug. On with the DVDs from last year.

The Forgotten I think this came out, but can't be absolutely sure. I've asked around, even called the studio that released it, and no one can verify this movie was made. Quite aptly titled, at least. I understand it may have been produced three years ago and someone found it lying around on a shelf on the backlot. He unwisely chose to release it, whoever he was. But it's hardly...
It's a new year, readers, and a new chance to decimate our low standards until they've reached rock bottom—then again, our nation has made Adam Sandler and Ashley Judd both millionaires. Is there much further left to go? Bah, humbug. On with the DVDs from last year. The ForgottenI think this came out, but can't be absolutely sure. I've asked around, even called the studio that released it, and no one can verify this movie was made. Quite aptly titled, at least. I understand it may have been produced three years ago and someone found it lying around on a shelf on the backlot. He unwisely chose to release it, whoever he was. But it's hardly worth the effort of cursing him. A Julie or Juliette or Julianne stars in it. Don't trouble yourself any further with it. Sky Captain and the World of TomorrowA movie as deep and textured as the sweat on my upper lip. Jude Law was doing so many movies concurrently I think half the lines he spouts are from Alfie in this one. Imagine the Nazi regime meets futuristic technology—oh, wait, you don't have to imagine. "Star Trek" has already done it—repeatedly. And more enjoyably. Still, Angelina Jolie's breasts weren't given co-star billing in that series. RayIn fairness, I have to say that Jamie Foxx is fairly impressive as an impression/caricature of Ray Charles. You forget he's Jamie Foxx, which is always a good thing. Still, he did a WB sitcom for years, and for that alone I'll keep an Oscar from him, clutched with my dying hands. Call me a stickler. Otherwise, this is a movie about someone who is born and dies, and whose life seems much more amazing on screen than the rest of ours. In short, it's a biopic, nothing new. They never once show Ray Charles shopping, buying milk or anything, which I'm more curious about than how he learned to play the piano—what if the milk's date has expired? There's a real puzzler. Still, it makes my top five for least forgettable films of the year, not that it's a compliment. Alien Vs. PredatorWhen I saw this was coming out, I wet myself with excited anticipation. I believe I made a joke about this when Predator 2 came out—I love it when movie studios make movies out of my jokes. I'm still waiting for the priest/rabbi bar movie I talked about a few years ago. What makes this movie so original is the Predator and the Alien fight a lot. There is no pretense about teaching us anything, or distracting us for a few minutes with amusing characters. Still, quite a let down, as far as pure revulsion goes. Oh, it's repulsive—nothing the mentally challenged would take seriously. But I was hoping for that real extra mile of uncreative pap to make it meet my expectations. Carmen Electra co-starring, or comic relief by Tom Green. Still, not a bad piece of cinematic feces. If this is the best Hollywood has to offer, it's going to be a slow year. Still, a comedy starring Barbra Streisand and Robert De Niro is the number one movie in the country… something to be said about the tough pure evil of that one.   |