Comic for Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

Posted: 8:50 am, Wednesday, March 14th

So there was this crazy program on Thirteen last night, the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus. Has anyone ever seen this thing? It is absolutely insane. The Stones evidently recorded this TV special to promote Beggars' Banquet, but felt like they got totally upstaged by the Who (they were right) and vaulted the thing. The theme is that the Stones are the ringleaders of a circus and they introduce the acts - Jethro Tull, some dude I didn't recognize (Taj Mahal, I guess), the Who, Marianne Faithfull, and then this superband that Lennon put together with him, Clapton, Keith Richards, and somebody else I didn't recognize. Lennon sang one rock-blues song, and then a violinist and Yoko Ono came to front the band for a song. Yoko's vocals were, almost predictably, entirely screeching. It was awesome. I know absolutely nothing about the Who (seriously, Baba O'Reilly and the CSI theme song are about it), but they killed. The Stones were evidently debuting all new stuff (it's funny to think of Sympathy for the Devil being new, but, hey), except for You Can't Always Get What You Want, which, as hinted at by Jen last week, is my favorite song of theirs. All in all, a surreal hour and a half on PBS last night. But very good.

Oh, sweet, Viacom apparently doesn't own the rights to these clips. Here are the Who:

Here is the Lennon supergroup, Dirty Mac:

And here's part of the Stones (doing my song):

The Dirty Mac clip was slow-loading, so I didn't see the end of it, but the timestamp didn't seem long enough for Yoko to do her screeching. Too bad, that.

Anyway, real quick story before I go (reasonably certain I've told this one before). So Sweaty and I are in a bar in Queens back in April of '01, pretty soon after I move down here. We were going to a Sox-Goat Fuckers game the next day (one that Lowe would give up back-to-back jacks in the bottom of the ninth to blow the lead and then lose the game - brutal, especially because I think Manny went yard twice that day)(also, I think it was Ted Lilly's first start, and he struck out nine Sox, and some girl on the way out said that she hoped the Sox never won the series, and I thought of her the day we did and wished bad-but-not-awful things for her), so we were just getting a drink or two at a neighorhood bar. There's this old rummy next to us watching the highlights, trying to tell us that Scott Brosius was the best hitter in the major leagues and that he (the rummy, not Brosius) could hit any pitcher in the bigs except for Troy Percival. And then the bartender, Irish guy, put on a new disc, and it was Travis, so I told him I thought they were pretty decent.

Old rummy: Nah, y'want decent music, I'll give ya - Bob-o, you ever heard of the Rolling Stones?

Bartender: Excuse me, the who?

Old rummy: No, not the Who, the Rolling Stones. I tell ya, they were great.

It was like vaudeville for an audience of me and Sweats.

Oh, and happy birthday, MNP.

bullfrog

As for your weather inconsistencies... here in Chicagoland we set a record high of 73 yesterday, and will now be in the 30's by the afternoon today. It's just that time of year, so don't sweat it. Gotta love old rummys... I once listened to a guy tell me 50 times that he convinced the old owners of the restaurant to put pork chops on the menu. And each time I think he was fairly certain he was imparting new knowledge.

Didn't we start going through other hitters asking him who could hit Troy Percival? I don't think that we could come up with batters that the old rummy thought could get a hit off of Troy Percival.

I think we went about it the other way and asked him which other pitchers he could hit off of. I know he wasn't impressed by Pedro, and this was 2001 Pedro, at the tail-end of his stretch where he could strike out God on three pitches.

The old rummy at our current local tells the same forty-five terrible jokes over and over again. He's not really an old rummy, just a guy who goes to the bar to watch the Mets and drinks half-pints of Buds, but those jokes of his never seem old to him.

I have never before appreciated that one of my math major friends was born on Pi Day.

http://www.qwantz.com/index.pl?comic=955

You know there's an Animanics joke that goes into the Who, What, and the Stones at Woodstock, of all places. Wonder if Warner Brothers has sued You Tube over that?

I'll tell you what I'm surprised that they aren't suing You Tube: video game companies. The number of You Tube video I've seen involving actual video game play is staggering. In some instances, I can view an entire game from first level to final boss, and then decide (as I did with Mortal Kombat: Shadolin Monks) that it sucked and isn't worth getting.

Of course, to find out it only takes about thirty minutes of game play to beat Morrowind also sucks too.

Huh! Hadn't used it for that purpose yet.

By the way... are you using Ice, Ice Baby in your blog tag identifier thingamajig? (I'm not technically proficient in blogspeak, but when I hover the cursor over Five Bucks in my favorites list, there's usually a part of a song) Sorry, that was a long parenthetical.

Yep. The title bar (or whatever - I'm not sure what it is, either) is generally a line from whatever song I'm listening to as I "blog," as the kids call it. Today happened to be Vanilla Idiot, a mash-up of Ice, Ice Baby and Radiohead's Idioteque. It's available here and I think it's just great. The bleakness of the Kid A material makes Vanilla Ice almost not seem like a joke.

http://www.mp3raid.com/search/mp3/vanilla_ninja.html

Ice, Ice Baby (Too Cold, Too Cold)...

We need more "Vanilla" named perfirners, especially considering where I've heard that the rap sales are down 25% this year from last year.