Follow Your Dreams. Even If You Suck.

American rock band Van Halen, formed in 1972, has sold almost 100 million records in its forty-some years of existence. Fifty-six million of those sales are of the albums released between 1978 and 1985, during the first tenure of lead singer David Lee Roth: Van Halen, Van Halen II, Women and Children First, Fair Warning, Diver Down, and 1984.

Roth was replaced in 1985 by Sammy Hagar, who in 1996 was almost replaced by David Lee Roth. Neither Roth nor Hagar were in the band in 1996, so technically neither one was replaced as lead vocalist by Extreme’s Gary Cherone, who was with the band until 1999 and then replaced in 2003 by Sammy Hagar . . . who was replaced in 2008 by David Lee Roth.

The band’s latest release, 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth, has sold one million copies, far lower than the usual for their other albums but still several hundred thousand copies per lead singer.

What’s more interesting than the band’s legendary inability to get along is, frankly, that David Lee Roth has been able to make a lifelong—and very lucrative—career as a singer:

The moral of the story here is that America is, even today, still the land of opportunity. If you work hard and find something you’re good at, you can be a great success . . . but even if you’re no good, no big deal. Follow your dreams, even if you kind of suck at them.

Nike Takes a Courageous Stance Against Certain Kinds of Cheating

Tiger Woods, professional golfer

Tiger Woods, immediately after bombarded
by gamma radiation.

Moral misstep: slept with a woman who was not his wife, and then—having decided that that was pretty awesome—went on to sleep with five, nine, eleven, or 121 others, depending on which disgusting internet source you choose to believe.

Marketability: while his popularity may not be what it once was,¹ he’s still a well-known and much-discussed athlete in what is inexplicably one of the world’s most popular sports. While he’s not playing up to his usual standards of late, he has the potential to continue to golf at a very high level for the next five to twenty-five years, making him a huge boon for any company with the right amount of moral fiber to stick with him through a few thousand minor marital indiscretions.

Nike’s stance: Everything’s swell. The Tiger Woods Center at Nike’s headquarters remains, as you may have guessed, named after Tiger Woods.

Kobe Bryant, shooting guard, Los Angeles Lakers (NBA)

Kobe Bryant, having briefly forgotten that the name
that matters to him is the one on the back of the jersey.

Moral misstep: accused of rape by nineteen-year-old Katelyn Faber; while the charges were dropped after Faber refused to testify, Bryant later publicly stated that while he “truly believe[s] this encounter . . . was consensual,” he “now understand[s] how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.” So viewed in the best possible light, he had sex with a woman who was not his wife. Given the competition in this category, one single adulterous affair seems positively quaint, but it’s still not a particularly decent thing to do.

Marketability: remains active as the most popular player on the Los Angeles Lakers, one of the NBA’s most popular teams, with potential to make Nike oodles of money for at least another four to six years.

Nike’s stance: no problems here.

Ben Roethlisberger, quarterback, Pittsburgh Steelers (NFL)

Moral misstep: accused of sexual assault in 2008; no charges filed. Accused of sexual assault in 2010; no charges filed. After the second accusation, he served four games of a six-game suspension and lost his Fathead endorsement. A spokesman for the company stated at the time, “We named our company Fathead, not Fat Asshole.”²

Marketability: Two-time super Bowl champion, marquee quarterback on one of the absurdly popular and marketable NFL’s most popular and marketable teams. While his career may not last more than another five to six years or two to three allegations, even mediocre players and backups  sell jerseys.

Nike’s stance: Are we under oath, here? No? Then what he may have done would have been bad, and we’re definitely going to cut him loose any day now. Honest.

Lance Armstrong: cyclist, seven-time Tour de France winner

Have you ever spent a lifetime sitting on a bicycle
seat? Trust us, you’d look this grouchy too.

Moral Misstep: despite his repeated and strenuous statements to the contrary, Lance Armstrong may well turn out to have been something of a cheater in the otherwise squeaky-clean world of competitive cycling. He joins the very brief list of cyclists who have tested positive, admitted to doping, or been sanctioned for doping that includes—and is absolutely, almost definitely, probably limited to—barely-known racers such as Marco Pantani, Jan Ullrich, Roland Meier, Alex Zuille, Laurent Dufaux, Abraham Olano, Richard Virenque, Bjarne Riis, Christophe Moreau, Roberto Heras, Richard Virenque, Francisco Mancebo, Igor González, Óscar Sevilla, Raimondas Rumsas, Levi Leipheimer, Alexandre Vinokourov, Iban Mayo, Ivan Basso, Michael Rasmussen, Floyd Landis, Alberto Contador, Alejandro Valverde, Mikel Astarloza, Bernhard Kohl, Christian Vande Velde, Fränk Schleck, Tadej Valjavec, and Tyler Hamilton.³

Marketability: one of the best-known figures in the world when it comes to providing emotional, physical, and financial support to survivors of cancer, a disease that has to some degree, directly or indirectly, affected pretty much every person on Earth. Ever. On the other hand, he’s retired, and he participated in a sport that nobody in Nike’s U.S. demographic gave a shit about before Lance Armstrong came along.

Nike’s stance: Screw you, Lance Armstrong.

In the past, Nike has cut ties with sports figures such as Marion Jones (for her alleged and later admitted use of performance-enhancing drugs), the late Joe Paterno (who, of course, technically didn’t do anything but also, of course, didn’t do anything), and Michael Vick (who was coincidentally reinstated with Nike once he’d become popular again).

We’re not going to say that Nike should have maintained its ties with Lance Armstrong, regardless of whether the doping charges against him were (or are) ever proved or definitively disproved—that’s completely up to them. And we’re not saying that Armstrong’s admirable work with his foundation gives him a pass if he is, in fact, a big fat blood doper—although this raises the interesting question of whether it’s better to be a great guy in your sport but a turd in your personal life, or the reverse.
 
We’re simply a little disappointed that the message we’re all getting from Nike here seems to be “if you’re gonna get caught cheating, it’d better be on your wife.”⁴



NOTES
1. Except perhaps in the limited circles in which he was always apparently popular—after all, ladies, he’s single now. Rawr.
2. No, of course we made that up.
3. The part about these guys being “barely known” is just us being sarcastic. While we recognize only a handful of their names, all of them have finished in the top ten of the Tour de France at least once in the last fifteen years.
4. We realize that Ben Roethlisberger doesn’t fit the “cheater” theme here, as he was not married when he was accused of sexual assault. Twice. He does, however, still have a valid place in this piece, thanks to its overarching theme of “pro athletes who are definitely or at least probably dicks.”

Why We Like Sir Alec Guinness

Yeah, sure, Alec Guinness played Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai, Jamessir Bensonmum in Murder by Death, and Obi-Wan Kenobi in The Only Reason Americans Under Forty Remember Alec Guinness, and his name is an anagram for genuine class. But as if that weren’t enough already, here’s another great reason to like him:

In case you haven’t spotted it, check out the t-shirt he’s wearing under his Jedi robes.

It’s an obvious connection to make, of course, given his last name,¹ of course, and he’s probably not the first movie star to enjoy a drink—assuming there was any available, what with Oliver Reed being alive at the time. But the possibility that he had that same t-shirt on while the cameras were rolling makes Alec Guinness—not to mention Obi-wan Kenobi—just that much cooler.


NOTE
1. Alec Guinness’s last name, for those of you who aren’t keeping up, is “Guinness.”

Courtney Love and Bobby Brown to Spare Two Innocent Lives, Marry One Another

 

This is what the world is left with . . .

. . . instead of this. It hardly seems fair, does it?

The Swiss Institute for Groundbreaking Studies has confirmed that any potential child of the union between Love and Brown would be the world’s highest-functioning cocaine-based lifeform, relegating Charlie Sheen to a distant second.

Metal Will Never Die. Your Experience May Vary.

Renowned heavy metal vocalist Ronnie James Dio died on May 16, 2010, and this, the first anniversary of his death, seems an appropriate time to ponder some of the accomplishments of his long and storied career. (Those accomplishments we can think of, anyway, or glean from the Internet; we didn’t actually listen to all that much Dio growing up.)

Ronnie James Dio is known for having popularized the hand gesture generally known today as the “devil horns.” Despite its common name, the gesture didn’t initially have any sort of Satanic overtones.¹ In actuality, it came from Dio’s Italian grandmother,² who considered the gesture a means of warding off the maloccio, or evil eye—a protection against evil, rather that some sort of endorsement of it. Whatever its origin, however, the gesture has become synonymous with an awesomeness than only heavy metal can achieve.³

Not to be confused with: (left) Hook ’em Horns—virtually identical but rarely seen outside of Texas; (center) “I love you”; or (right) Spider-Man.

Given the decidedly silly band names with which he was associated in his early years, Dio deserves credit simply for having been able to keep his career alive. While he did, of course, spend time with Black Sabbath and his own band, Dio, before that he was a member of the band Elf—initially called The Electric Elves, believe it or not—and also Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow.

Really—Rainbow. He was in a band called Rainbow, and this apparently didn’t bother him one bit. Some sources suggest that, when he collaborated in 2006 with former Black Sabbath bandmates Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Vinny Appice, Dio considered naming the band Strawberry Shortcake before eventually settling on the more prosaic Heaven & Hell.⁴

Rainbow: Because this shit is fucking heavy.

Dio is also known to have inspired at least two songs by occasionally semi-serious acoustic metal band Tenacious D, quite possibly the greatest band in the world, according to their various promotional materials. The vast majority of Tenacious D’s songs are inspired by (and often about) mythical creatures, marijuana,  themselves, or the majesty of rock, so to be able to lay claim to not one but two of their compositions is quite a distinction. One of these songs, “Dio,” from their self-titled 2001 album, is in fact about Dio, whereas “Kickapoo,” from 2006’s Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny,⁵ features a guest vocal from the man himself.

Perhaps Ronnie James Dio’s greatest achievement is one that he never intended, or even necessarily thought much about: his success goes a long way to prove that heavy metal is perhaps the most egalitarian of all musical genres. Let’s face it: normal- to odd-looking people rarely stand a chance of making it big in the music industry; looks and moderate (or barely measurable) talent generally get the breaks rarely awarded to the gifted but schlumpy.

Case in point—C+C Music Factory:

You thought Zelma Davis was going to make you sweat.

. . . turns out it was actually Martha Wash.

 

In heavy metal, on the other hand,

you think you’re listening to this guy . . .

. . . when you’re actually listening to this guy.

Granted, hard rock music has its own problems with image and appearances—there’s a very good reason why the name “hair metal” stuck so well to an entire era’s worth of bands—and it’s quite possible that, had Dio’s career begun in the golden age of the music video, rather than the decades beforehand, he would have struggled, his unconventional appearance made a punchline instead of being dismissed as irrelevant in the face of his talent.

Nah, who are we kidding? That doesn’t really happen, does it?

NOTES

1. And doesn’t really now, either, no matter what Tipper Gore might want you to believe. Or whoever it is that says heavy metal music is all about Satan—we think Tipper really cared only about naughty words.

2. Granny James Dio.

3. Mrs. (Dr.) Some Guy even inadvertently used the “devil horns” gesture in a characteristically enthusiastic moment during a job interview at a well-known and respected hospital, when describing something that—while now forgotten—totally rocked. She got the job, thus proving that pharmacists are the most metal of all hospital employees.

4. There is not a single source that suggests anything like this. We just made it up. But we’d love it if this silly joke becomes the seed of an absurd story that eventually becomes accepted as fact simply because it gets repeated hundreds of thousands of times all over the internet for no reason other than that people are willing to believe any dumb thing.

5. Why link to the German site for the Tenacious D movie? First, because German is the most metal of all languages—just ask Mötley Crüe or Mötörhëäd—and second, because we couldn’t find the English page.

Aflac Duck Not Insured against Stupidity

Abrasive comedian Gilbert Gottfried has been fired from perhaps his most recognizable job—providing the voice of insurance giant Aflac’s frustrated talking duck—mere hours after tweeting a series of jokes that made light of the destructive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011.¹ As of this writing, more than 1,500 people have died, and that number is almost certain to continue to rise.

Now, to be fair, the idea of “laughing in the face of death” is an old and venerated one. No less a writer than William Shakespeare illustrated it memorably in his gory and generally messed-up tragedy/revenge fantasy Titus Andronicus, in which the protagonist—we forget his name—having witnessed the last of a long series of horrific indignities and evils done to him and his family by his enemies,² bursts into not sorrow but laughter, stating “I have not another tear to shed” before starting to act crazy and getting down to some truly awful business.³ His laughter is jarring, even shocking, but it reveals a man not callously indifferent to suffering and misery, but one overwhelmed by it.

Duck (bottom), and dick.

But we would give Gottfried—probably neither the first nor last person to be given the nickname “America’s Creepy Uncle”—entirely too much credit by comparing him to Shakespeare,⁴ and there is significant difference between an imaginary character’s barking out mad laughter at the horror surrounding him, and a real live human’s making cheap jokes about real-world death.⁵ 

There’s much to be said about timing, too, and timing—despite generally being crucial for comedy—does not appear to be one of Gottfried’s strengths. At a Friars’ Club roast of Hugh Hefner, Gottfried famously joked about his concern that his flight out of town “had a connection at the Empire State Building.” He told this joke in New York City, mere weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The crowd did not respond well, but Gottfried managed to salvage the evening with a particularly inspired rendition of perhaps the most famously offensive joke ever told,⁶ and clearly left the building without having learned a lesson about things he shouldn’t say, and when and where they shouldn’t be said.

Gilbert Gottfried appears to have been unaware that laughing in the face of death is only noble—or even halfway human—if you’re laughing at the prospect of your own death. Laughing in the face of other people’s deaths is, almost without fail, disgusting.⁷ We don’t know the point in time at which it will become acceptable to make jokes about what has happened in Japan over the last week, but we’re very sure that that point doesn’t happen while rescuers are still searching for bodies.

NOTES

1. In the interest of good taste, those jokes will not be repeated here. In the interest of questionable taste and a desire to keep our readers informed, however, a link to a short list of them has been provided. If you can find it.

2. Among them: Titus kills one of his own sons for defying the Roman Emperor; the new Empress, wishing revenge on Titus, allows her sons to violate and mutilate Titus’ daughter; Titus later cuts off his own hand to spare the lives of two of his remaining sons, but they are executed anyway and their heads (and his hand) returned to Titus to mock him. After that, though, the play gets kind of messed up.

3. If you’re not interested in watching Julie Taymor’s intriguing but weird and exceedingly grim Titus, check out the South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die.” You’ll wish you hadn’t, but if you can filter out the weirdness, the Hannibal Lecter references, and the guest appearance by Radiohead, you’ll get the gist of Titus Andronicus.
4. A reasonable comparison between Shakespeare and Gilbert Gottfrield would involve their height: Gottfried is 5'5", and Shakespeare lived four hundred years ago, so he was probably pretty shrimpy. Also, Shakespeare, having acted in his own tragedies, probably died on stage plenty of times, and we suspect that Gottfried has too.
5. We’re basing this statement on the tenuous evidence that Gilbert Gottfried does, in fact, exist.
6. We would prefer that our readers do not attempt to look up this joke for any reason, especially readers that are, for example, our mom. That goes for “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” too.   
7. Eddie Izzard successfully joked about Hitler’s death, but of course that’s an easy exception to make because Hitler, as Izzard correctly understated, “was a mass-murdering fuckhead.” Exceptions to the rule against joking about others’ deaths are few and far between.

Eddie Van Halen’s Body Celebrates Another Year of Roaming the Earth

“I’m just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as
my brain and fingers work, I’m cool.” Sadly, zombies ate most of his
brain and fingers. 

 
The body of Eddie Van Halen, the flashy and innovative guitarist whose eponymous band dominated the American rock scene in the late 1970s and much of the 1980s, celebrated its fifty-sixth year of existence today by lurching through its hometown’s darkened, abandoned streets in search of human flesh.

Van Halen on turning fifty-six: “Brains? Braaaaaains.”

Van Halen’s body currently spends its days aimlessly wandering throughout Studio City, California, with a look of vacant sadness on its face—its stiffened fingers absently thudding against the wood of the fabled Frankenstrat guitar in a perverse sign of a lingering memory of its past existence—as it shambles past boarded-up houses, silent movie theaters, and shadowed Red Line entrances, occasionally bumping clumsily against handrails and tumbling violently down subway stairs only to land on its feet.

Don’t even pretend this isn’t scary.

The guitarist’s creative output slowed considerably after being bitten by the reanimated corpse of Mick Jagger in early 1999, and after several trying months of transition, exhibited dedication to its new lifestyle by devouring not only three lead singers but also original bassist Michael Anthony. On rare occasions it wanders far from home, partially regurgitating David Lee Roth to fulfill touring needs and thus revealing a shadowy semblance of human financial acumen.

Despite his death more than a decade ago, Van Halen is still considered to be more musically gifted than the Insane Clown Posse, a more interesting conversationalist than Courtney Love, and more likely to produce an essential new album than the Rolling Stones.

Sacagawea: An American Icon

On August 31, 1803, the Lewis and Clark Expedition left Pittsburgh to, in the words of President Thomas Jefferson,

“explore the Missouri River and such principal stream of it as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river that may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce.”

Among the expedition party—and arguably its most famous member, surpassing even Lewis and, er, that other guy—was the Shoshone woman Sacagawea, who not only served as the expedition’s interpreter and guide across thousands of miles of unfamiliar, unforgiving, and potentially hostile wilderness, but also did everything the other explorers did, except backwards and in high heels.¹

While genuine biographical facts about Sacagawea are limited,² her presence on the Expedition was not only integral to its success but also remarkable in that she joined the expedition while pregnant, gave birth in the middle of it, and carried on until the end with a newborn son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, in tow.³ It’s known that she later had another child, Lizette, with Toussaint Charbonneau; in 1811 she survived an attack on Fort Lisa, North Dakota, that took the lives of fifteen men; and in 1999 she became, by a wide margin, the least-butch woman ever to grace U.S. currency.
 

The sparse but commonly accepted history suggests that that Sacagawea died of a “putrid fever” on December 20, 1812, at only about twenty-four years old, at Fort Lisa, North Dakota. However, an alternate theory has been put forth that suggests that she long outlived this purported 1812 death, married into a Comanche tribe (after either a separation from, or the death of, Toussaint Charbonneau), and survived into the 1880s. This theory also suggests that, in addition to Jean Baptiste Charbonneau and Lizette Charbonneau, Sacagawea had five children by her second husband, a man named—according to this alternate theory—Jerk Meat.

I’ll repeat that more loudly, for those of you in the cheap seats: Jerk Meat. Please stop snickering—history is serious business.

It’s quite possible that naming conventions in nineteenth-century Comanche society didn’t fully anticipate the prevalence of the Beavis and Butt-head mentality of early twenty-first century American culture, but . . . seriously, Jerk Meat? How much did that poor guy get picked on as a kid?

If this alternate theory is to believed, there’s one trend that Jerk Meat’s parents did fully anticipate, and that’s the urge to give a poor, unsuspecting, defenseless little kid a ruthlessly stupid name. It’s unclear whether famous people gravitate towards this kind of name more than regular folks or it just seems that way, but famous people’s stupidly-named children are certainly easier to track down, so those are the ones I’m going to point out:⁴

• Kal-El: Son of Nicholas Cage, who apparently dreams of launching his boy out into deep space. I guess if you’re going to name your kid after a comic-book character, you could do worse. “Spawn” comes to mind.

• Pilot Inspecktor: Son of Jason Lee, former skateboarder and star of My Name is Earl, a show in which his wife’s son, Dodge, got his name because his (at the time) unknown father drove a Ford. The silly-name theme extends even to fiction.

• Fifi Trixibelle: Daughter of Bob Geldof, singer of the Boomtown Rats’ lone hit “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and later star of the movie version of The Wall. For all we know, he may also have other accomplishments in the last twenty-eight years.

• Apple: Daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and that dude from that band that wants to sound like U2. No, the other band. No, the other dude.

• Prince Michael Jackson/Prince Michael Jackson II: Michael Jackson, one of his generation’s most gifted musicians and lyricists, apparently met his match when it came time for him to think up two measly boys’ names. So, in a stroke of genius, he named his boys after himself and their mother, Rogers Nelson.

• George Jr., George III, George IV, George V and George VI: Sons of boxer George Foreman. I refuse to mock George Foreman for his name selection, on account of the fact that the guy has been punched in the head more times than I’ve gotten out of bed.⁴ Plus, I’m quite certain that he (at sixty-one years old), any of his sons, and most of his daughters could beat the shit out of me. So name your kids whatever you want, George, I’m not going to say a word.

• Moon Unit, Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen, Ahmet, and Dweezil: children of musician and composer Frank Zappa. When “Ahmet” is the most normal name your kids end up with, maybe you should rethink your priorities. Technically, Dweezil Zappa was born Ian Donald Calvin Euclid Zappa—pretty darn normal, by Zappa standards. He grew up being called “Dweezil,” however, and didn’t learn of his legal name until he was five. He wanted to be Dweezil for real, and had his name legally changed. This is all fine and good, but come on, he was five. Can you really trust a five-year-old’s judgment? When I was five, I wanted to be a train.

• Sage Moonblood: Son, or perhaps daughter, of Sylvester Stallone. This isn’t any sort of commentary on Sage Moonblood Stallone’s masculinity or femininity, it’s just that Sage could be a man’s or a woman’s name, and I’m too lazy to look it up. And yes, I know how easy it is to look things up on the internet.

• Moxie Crimefighter: Child of Penn Jillette, the noisy half of the magician and comedian duo Penn & Teller. If I weren’t in the middle of griping about how awful it is to give kids names like these, I might admit that “Crimefighter,” as a middle name, is pretty fucking awesome.

• Tallulah, Scout, and Rumer: Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. I’m tempted to be complain that the least they could have done was spell “Rumer” like a real word,⁶ but I don’t think it’d do any good.

To be fair, regular unknown folks also do give their kids unusual names, although it’s a lot easier to find them when those kids get famous: Coco Crisp (baseball player), Peerless Pryce (American football player), Soleil Moon Frye (former child actress), Zooey Deschanel (current grown-up actress), Milton Bradley (baseball player/grouch). And Dane Cook, while he does not have children, has considered naming his children “Megatron” and “Optimus Prime.”⁷

While unfortunate names like these can (or did) lead to tough times growing up, these kids can take solace in knowing that their futures are not necessarily dim. History tells us⁸ that their spiritual predecessor, Jerk Meat, may well have led a very meaningful and satisfying life, if he actually existed; married a strong and beautiful woman, unless she’d actually died years before; lived to a ripe and joyous old age, as far as we know; and probably drifted blissfully off into the next life surrounded and supported by his loving children, Horseradish, Dick Head, Ted Nugent, Fatty Fatty Fatpants, and Mortimer Julius Underbuttocks III.

NOTES

1. It’s possible that we’re confusing Sacagawea with Ginger Rogers. You’d be surprised how often this happens.

2. According to a Wikipedia article I just skimmed and essentially plagiarized. Their sentence reads, at the moment, “Reliable historical information about Sacagawea is very limited.” I rewrote the sentence as it appears above so I can pass it off as my own scholarship, which is why you will find no reference or link here to any Wikipedia article.

3. Take that, Meriwether Lewis, you non-childbearing pussy.

4. I got most of these names here.

5. And he’d back me up on this: "If you're in boxing, too; you heard of Muhammad Ali, Kenny Norton, Joe Frazier. Evander Holyfield. They all hit me on the head. How many names am I going to remember?"

6. Roomer, ruler, tumor. Pick one, they’re all real words.

7. This could easily be interpreted as part of a comedy routine, except that it is yet to be determined whether Dane Cook has ever tried to do anything funny.

8. Or it could, if it wanted to.