From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V16 #346 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Friday, September 21 2007 Volume 16 : Number 346 Today's Subjects: ----------------- tl;dr: we came here to rock the microphone [Rex ] Re: the air eaters [Steve Schiavo ] WWCGD? [Jill Brand ] Re: the air eaters [Barbara Soutar ] Re: the air eaters ["edwardofsim@tiscali.co.uk" ] Shanks...for the memories [Michael Sweeney ] Breakfast at Tiffany's [hssmrg@bath.ac.uk] Re: Breakfast at Tiffany's ["Stewart C. Russell" ] Re: tl;dr: we came here to rock the microphone [Rex ] Breaking news [kevin ] Re: tl;dr episode iv: fat bob strikes back [Michael Sweeney Subject: tl;dr: we came here to rock the microphone The Go! Team, "Thunder Lightning Strike". I do not think I ever listened to this entire album, although for a few stretches of time over the past few years I've obsessively listened to "Ladyflash" over and over again, either in its original version or this wacked out live take from KEXP that ends in a Sonic Youth-like feedback fury. As to the album itself, well, I feel pretty certain that in 1992 or so, I believed, and probably even hoped, that almost all music would sound like this by the 21st Century. It's just cool to me that everything from exotica orchestration to hip hop, naove cheer-chants and big-beat can get mixed up with (seriously) letter-perfect SY riffing, MBV interstitials, art-banjo and Cure basslines, and come out so damned fun. Somehow they seem to have symthesized all the same influences and elements that inform and make up Stereolab, but ended up in a completely different place, like siblings who get the opposite groupings of their parents' genes. Like The Avalanches, it's obviously pastiche that's been generated by really smart minds with big record collections, but where the Avalanches get their fun/humor out of stitching little bits of dialogue and beats together on a microscopic level, The Go! Team glues bigger slabs to each other and lets the joy of collision speak for itself. You want to play it loud and pretend to be in that other 21st Century that could have been. I've read reviews of this album which call its sound so lo-fi as to be a willful affront to the conventions of recorded sound, but that only makes me believe that some people have obviously listened to far few intentionally weird records, bootlegs, demos, low-budget recordings and other oddball audio relics than I have (or that I've listened to such equal amounts of lo- and h-fi material that the distance between Steely Dan and Guided By Voices counts for less to me than it does for a lot of people). I can hear that the drums are often stomping out distorted jams over already overdriven loops and that sort of thing, but it all sounds pretty intentional and fully realized to me. Sometimes I wish the raps were pushed to the front a bit more, but that, once again, just makes me turn it up, and having done so, feel happy about it whether or not the raps get any clearer. It's all good. Did these guys do another album, and if so, did it rate? The live incarnation sounded ridiculously fun. Liquid Liquid, "Liquid Liquid". This is one of those postpunk funk outfits about which I know the least, and picked up just because I kept seeing the name cropping up between ESG and A Certain Ratio. It is a very appropriate thing to hear right after The Go! Team, despite the more than two decades which separate the. Liquid Liquid is all groove, pretty much; the second track, "Cavern", can be recognized immediately as the source for the loop in "White Lines", but what minimal vocals there are are more along the lines of Lydon in early P.I.L., or maybe even Damo Suzuki. It's sort of like The Pop Group with less chaos, or ACR with the vocal presence weirded up a little bit. Why is it that Brits seem perfectly content to out a complete loon out in front of a band and love him or her as they are, while Americans seem to demand that their loony frontpersons have some kind of image or sex appeal or somethingit's that repressed Puritanism/perversion thing again, isn't it? In any case, the minimal vocal approach here has its good and bad points as a listening experience it's a treasure trove of brilliantly simple grooves, but there's not much to grab onto beyond that and maybe that's why it was up to others to recycle and adorn it. There's a pretty compelling mystery as to how and why this came to be, though the lyrics are basically incscrutable and song titles like "Groupmegroup", "Zero Leg" and "Rubbermiro" suggest something odd going on that can't quite be seen from the surface. The live tracks at the end are a lot more aggressive and Pop Group-esque, but the proper album would sound good next to "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" any day. St. Vincent, "Marry Me". As the first track unfolds, being who I am and having listened to the kind of stuff I do these days, I start off asking "Wait, is she doing Kate Bush or The Raincoats?", and by the tracks's raucous ending, I conclude "Yes", but then I start to wonder. Teh pr0g lurks always, but not too off-puttingly although it's beginning to strike me as a real reversal that the first releases by one-person-bands and home-recording outfits these days are starting to sound more and more like the densely-arranged orchestrations and mini-operas that most bands used to have to wait for the big label bucks to fund. And while that's encouragingly democratizing, it sometimes seems like the simple, amazing phenomenon of two or more people laying together gets lost. Also, to reiterate, drums are really damn loud these days. The lyrics are fine, from what I can make out the whole package is okay, really, but I don't think it's my kind of thing what seems like experimentation at first begins to feel a little like grandstanding after a while. I'll give it another listen, but barring a major revelation, this just seems a little too musically academic for my tastes. I can imagine some fanbase crossover with Dresden Dolls (who aren't my cuppa, either) and whatsitcalled, My Brightest Chemical Valentine Hope Diamonds, whom I dislike strongly based on just hearing an interview with the songwriter where she dripped with contempt for, and incomprehension of, pop music I haven't heard any of that artist's music, but I hope it's way worse than this album, just so I can say "ha", and then crank up The Go! Team again. Or The Slits. Can't forget about the soaring heartland authenticity and unifying compassion of The Slits. (Okay, nobody's getting the Hilburn thing sorry.) Slint, "Spiderland". Again with the seminal, legendarily influential indie act that I somehow missed the first time around. It's pretty unique in that it doesn't sound especially like any one other band of its time, but aspects of it certainly, specifically echo Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, Fugazi, Mudhoney the oddball time signatures sound more jazz than prog, the arty spoken-word stuff is more New York than Middle Earth. Occasionally I find myself thinking, "This is gonna turn into some shit like Helmet or something, isn't it?" but then it thankfully moves on to more textural territory. I really hated music in the '90's, man. Brilliant stuff was being done on the fringes of everything, but for the most part it was Blind Alley City for one musical "movement" after another, the trashing of a lot of stuff that had meant a great deal to me and other of my ilk (assuming I have one.) There are aspects of this album that I like very much, the quieter passages where the tonalities of the guitars tell the story it's like a slightly more hushed, slower variation on the late '90's Sonic Youth sound, but a little more dynamic. It demands listening in an environment with less background noise, so I'll need to revisit itI have no clue as to how good or bad the words may be. But I totally recognize the closing track dunno where from, though a soundtrack? Kids, maybe? The album as a whole doesn't strike me as earthshaking, but I may be less familiar with the music that would spring from this well than I think, not being too immersed in "post rock" or what have you. But it does possess an atmosphere all its own. Lee "Scratch" Perry, "Megaton Dub One". This is some kind of who-the-hell-knows-what-it-is compilation in an ocean of many such artifacts. I have the three-disc set "Arkology" in the wings, but I have to relabel all the tracks to make it make sense, so meanwhile I figure let's take a listen to something with unclear origins that works sometimes. Certainly heavier and more modern than the albums from '76 and '78, the reverb and delay, and now phasing as well, are more liberally applied to guitars and vocals, fragments of which pop in and out of the mix at seemingly arbitrary points, which is along the lines of what I had been led to expect. More minor-key material for some reason, probably related to having heard a lot of Massive Attack, I associate dub with minor keys. Not being able to see the track names makes this even more disorienting. Maybe that's as it should be. All I can say for sure is that the sources for the tracks are of really inconsistent fidelity. More to come. The Clean, "Modern Rock". There was a time, not at all before teh intarnets but before they really good for anything other than e-mail, when you could find out about an alarming amount of interesting-sounding music without being very much able to hear it. And it would be thus that you would take fragments of web-derived information, such as James telling me who The Clean were based on a question about a lyric on a Chills record, out into the used bins of the real world and see what you could find. That time being, like 1995 or something, and The Clean's "Anthology", containing all the crucial original-run material, not having been released yet, you might still find something like "Vehicle", one of the two later "reunion" albums that The Clean released, before hearing that early stuff. "Vehicle", taken on its own merits, struck me as a nearly perfect record, even though I figured the bands' reputation was based on very different material I would go so far as to say that if someone asked me for the quintessential unfussy '80's melodic college-rock indie album, unclouded by circumstance, trauma, or commercial expectations, just that sound, pure and joyous as it comes, breezing by in sequence of similar-sounding but still energizing songs, I might well hand such a person a copy of "Vehicle" (even though I think it came out in the '90's). Maybe that makes a wee teeny bit ironic that the other Clean reunion album (which I hadn't heard until today, although a good deal of it is on "Anthology") turns out to be far less homogeneous in sound, and yet it's the one entitled "Modern Rock". I actually do love the way the sound on "Vehicle" almost never varies, but everything The Clean does here works out fine, too, the band having a number of strengths to which to play, and in a way it mirrors that diverse early output more directly. There are of course full-bore pop-rockers, but also acoustic tunes, instrumentals, Velvets-like organ drones (which actually end up sounding more like Yo La Tengo), pretty jangly waltzes, and a song with somebody's kid singing. Not what I was expecting, but not an unpleasant surprise. Mazzy Star, "Among My Swan". That's a cool album name, by the way. This remains the only post-superstardom Mazzy Star release, right? A commercial letdown but beloved by the faithful as a worthy, underrated followup, right? It certainly doesn't seem like a lesser record, really, although it is perhaps guilty of trying to push the envelope of stark 'n' dirgey past what the average music listener's attention span can brook. ???Track 7??? throws of some nice sparks with a slow build that culminates in an explosion of electric guitar, including an actual solo, but nothing actually rocks as such. Maybe that would feel too much like walking backwards to Roback, because he could do it the Cowboy Junkies around this time had comfortably retrofit the same kind of gloomy low-key vibe onto some Crazy Horse-style lumberato and made it seem natural (because it, you know, *is* natural). Nothing wrong with this at all, except maybe the "Fade Into Me" clone close to the end, nor any great leaps forward either. Unless there are examples of either in the lyrics, which I by and large can't hear right now. No Doubt, "The Very Best of No Doubt or Some Shit Like That". Nothing that I intentionally listened to, but I happen to have heard most of this in a friend's car over the weekend. I guess it's pop music history now. I knew every one of the songs, and every one of them is really, really terrible. Surely something can be unearthed from Ms. Stefani's lyrical catalog that gives that Axl Rose couplet a run for its money in the awfulness sweepstakes? As a near f'r'instance, I've always thought that she sings "my pregnant mind is fat full of envy again" (in "That One No Doubt Song"), but that can't be right, can it? CAN it? And look, even if it's not that, it's something close to that, and nothing even close to that can be any good anyway. It seems to be taken as a given that she's a really important artist and stuff these days, and I used to ignore this band whenever they played for free on campus in the middle of the day in 1990 or so. That, my friends, is why they don't call me "The Starmaker" or "The Man with the Midas Ear" or anything like that, but it does not explain what Gwen Stefani has done to become such an artiste, other than that she got famous writing and performing mediocre music and then wrote and performed some more mediocre music about the pros and cons of having become famous (and subsequently having a child, whi. Thanks. Also, I have just never personally found her all that hawt. I mean, Jesus, she's no Viv Albertine, is she? The Church, "El Momento Siguiente". In which I confirm previous hints that I know this band's catalog way too well. Part two of the "acoustic reinventions with Spanish titles" series. There are of course a couple of new songs, a few of which are interesting, and all of which do seem to indicate that getting off of heroin was a good idea for Steve Kilbey, in terms of lyric writing as well as all the rest of it. Now, as for the older tunes and what happens to them look, it just has to be said, "Reptile" is just a lame song. God knows it sounded awesome the first time I heard it, but even then the lyrics seemed bad, a case where the generic powerpop words would've been preferable, but taking away its delay pedal and changing it to a speakeasy shuffle does it no favors. And "Two Places at Once" is not only one of my least favorite Church songs evar, it also seems like the one they're determined to foist on me over and over againit's on here, and they've played it both times I've seen them live, and at 8 minutes a shot, that's just too much of my life spent on something that seems to be a song that Steve and Marty both wrote a set of bad lyrics for and then decided to use both of them for some reason. Elsewhere, a couple of newer songs that I didn't care for on their respective albums turn ("After Everything" and "Pure Chance") turn out to not be too bad; "Tantalised" gets a hokey but endearing raga makeover; "North South East West" loses a lot of interesting musical sections; there's a lot more piano and mandolin than you'd think, and the two other real oldies, "It's No Reason" and "Electric Lash" steal the show, and one can't help but suspect that the latter, which isn't otherwise radically reworked, was included just so it could be hear without the incredibly long snare fill out of the instrumental that was so distracting on the original. So there. I'd pick any number of other songs to acousticise if it were up to me "Louisiana", for one, although that album seems to have been written out of the Church canon, and if you really need an epic, what's wrong with "Bel Air"? And hell, I played "Hotel Womb" at a show this summer. Oh well. These are silly projects, and I wouldn't be bothering with The Church if they hadn't released such a great late period record in "Forget Yourself", just a few scant years ago, damn them. The Saints, "Eternally Yours". I know The Saints mostly from a handful of singles and a somewhat sketchy two-disc compilation I've had for a number of years, which demonstrated pretty clearly that their output was extremely hot and cold after the initial "punk years", but all of that early stuff seemed solid as anything, so maybe it'd be a good idea to start there. And yeah, this stuff is rock solidmusically and melodically it's as comparable to The Jam as to anyone else, the songs, of course, short and to the point and more importantly, I like the vocals, which don't have the slightest hint of the melodrama that seems to have crept in with the arena-rock production later on. And it's hardly orthodox punk: only about half of the songs sound like they couldn't have existed without the punk explosion, while the other half sound like well-crafted rock songs that benefit from the kick in the ass they're given to get them up to the speed and intensity required by the times. But you can hear the harmonicas an acoustic guitars winking at you at the whole time. I'll tell you one thing, all those Social Distortion fans that just came crawling out of the woodwork really have no excuse for not hearing this album. I do believe there are a few singles appended to the end of this release. They're fierce as well. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:41:05 -0400 From: "Stewart C. Russell" Subject: Re: the air eaters lep wrote: > > this sort of cult of people who claimed to be so highly > evolved that they survived by ingesting no food whatsoever, only air. Ah, the Breatharians. Gotta love 'em. Stewart ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 20:06:53 -0500 From: Steve Schiavo Subject: Re: the air eaters On Sep 20, 2007, at 3:13 PM, lep wrote: > the people who drill holes in their heads or better yet - - Steve _______________ Consciousness occurs at the fundamental level of Planck scale geometry, normally in and around microtubules between our ears. But when brain coherence is lost, quantum information related to consciousness and the unconscious mind remain in the universe, distributed but still entangled. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 21:35:36 -0400 (EDT) From: Jill Brand Subject: WWCGD? So, what does Christopher Gross do when he has a question? This is bothering me. Also, Eddie Tews is too cute with his Tain references. I like the fact that he can give himself completely to something. Sounds like someone else I know..... Jill ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:06:41 -0700 From: Barbara Soutar Subject: Re: the air eaters Lauren, you were mentioning the brain surgery technique known as trepanning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning For a brief overview of the history of brain surgery: http://www.brain-surgery.com/history.html Barbara Soutar Victoria, BC (Currently writing a graphic novel about my adventures in the neuro ward after brain surgery.) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 06:39:22 +0100 (GMT+01:00) From: "edwardofsim@tiscali.co.uk" Subject: Re: the air eaters >Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 16:13:01 -0400 >From: lep >Subject: the air eaters > >i thought that this article was in an issue of spin that i've had for >years, but it turns out that the issue i've had forever is the one >that has the article about the people who drill holes in their heads >because it makes them feel better. no lie. there's a name for it, and >i'm sure some of you even know what it is. the idea is that in >evolving to walk upright, there's too much pressure in our skulls or >brains, and a little hole is just the right thing. i guess like how >when you were a kid, you had to put an extra hole in the top of the >hawaiian punch can to make it work right. I thinks that's "trepaning" (sp?). Read a great thing (although it may have been in that awful Goldman book) about how John Lennon read about this practice and thought it was something the band should really try out. He tried to sell Paul on the idea, and Paul was like, "Well, why don't you try it out first -- you go drill a hole in your head, and if it turns out good maybe I'll have a go." >i try to be tolerant and figure as long as people aren't hurting one >another, but then i end up laughing in a little fit of non-tolerance >and dare i say snobbery. as mr. devoto says: "my mind ain't so open >that anything could fall right in." "Open mind, empty head." That thing about the Breatharians automatically makes me thing of that Simpsons episode where Lisa's crushing on that environmentalist guy, who describes himself as something like "a 9th-degree Vegan -- I don't eat anything that casts a shadow." peace, Edward (secretly excited to have de-lurked in response to one of Lauren's posts) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 01:59:04 -0400 From: lep Subject: Re: the air eaters Barbara Soutar says: > Lauren, you were mentioning the brain surgery technique known as trepanning. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning yes, that's it. the spin article would be about the people who are in the "self-trapanning" category, although some of them went out the country to have the procedure performed (i guess it's not FDA-approved to get the procedure just because you "feel like it.") in the article, bernardo bertolucci was mentioned as having watched a film of someone doing some DIY trapanning; he was going on about how gorgeous it was. i got a little queasy when bertolucci was going on about the beauty of the blood (maybe it's just payback for my watching "last tango in paris" a few too many times.) i thought bertolucci had actually made a film, but it seems not. this self-trapanning movie is referenced on this interesting site which has a list of (not surprisingly) bizarre movies that are or were MIA. the one i must be talking about is called HEARTBEAT IN THE BRAIN : http://www.pimpadelicwonderland.com/lost.html sadly (or not), it hasn't been FOUND! yet. > (Currently writing a graphic novel about my adventures in the neuro ward > after brain surgery.) i imagine that would be several kinds of graphic? as ever, lauren - -- - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "People with opinions just go around bothering one another." - The Buddha ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 06:40:08 +0000 From: Michael Sweeney Subject: Shanks...for the memories We got our Milwaukee tix (if Uncle Robbie's gonna skip Chicago this time, we sure ain't gonna skip him)...anyone else going to the Shank Hall show? (it'll be our first time there) Michael "1-1/2 games up - uh, sorry Brewers fans..." Sweeney _________________________________________________________________ Can you find the hidden words? Take a break and play Seekadoo! http://club.live.com/seekadoo.aspx?icid=seek_wlmailtextlink ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:14:40 +0100 From: hssmrg@bath.ac.uk Subject: Breakfast at Tiffany's Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:09:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Dwarf Subject: Re: tl;dr episode iv: fat bob strikes back Michael Sweeney wrote: [Hide Quoted Text] > kevin said: > >>Marcy Playground... > > So I should be glad that I've never to my conscious knowledge > > heard these guys? > > ...Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing myself (but maybe I > have and just don't know it)... http://youtube.com/watch?v=CKl_7zK3fbI I always thought of it as more bland than aggressively terrible. I can certainly think of a fair number of one hit wonders from that era I thought of as much worse. Nothing great, but at least it's not Deep Blue Something "Breakfast at Tiffany's." * Deacon Blue, a remarkably successful but undistinguished Britpop band. - - MRG ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 05:57:13 -0400 From: "Stewart C. Russell" Subject: Re: Breakfast at Tiffany's hssmrg@bath.ac.uk wrote: > > * Deacon Blue, a remarkably successful but undistinguished Britpop band. Britpop? No, they predate the '97 britpop scare by about a decade. It was my great misfortune to be working in the largest record store in Glasgow when their big breakthrough album came out - ack! Stewart ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 07:27:47 -0700 From: Rex Subject: Re: tl;dr: we came here to rock the microphone On 9/21/07, craigie* wrote: > > > > On 21/09/2007, Rex wrote: > > Oh well. These are silly projects, and I wouldn't > > be bothering with The Church if they hadn't released such a great late > > period record in "Forget Yourself", just a few scant years ago, damn them. > > > Have you heard 'Back With Two Beasts' ? No, but you have to love that title. That's one of the improv records, but the one that accidentally ended up having some songs, right? - -Rex ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:34:46 -0400 (EDT) From: Christopher Gross Subject: Re: WWCGD? On Thu, 20 Sep 2007, Jill Brand wrote: > So, what does Christopher Gross do when he has a question? This is > bothering me. Obviously, one of the voices in my head asks the others. Isn't that what everyone does? - --Chris ______________________________________________________________________ Christopher Gross On the Internet, nobody knows I'm a dog. chrisg@gwu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:21:00 -0700 (GMT-07:00) From: kevin Subject: Breaking news http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/09/21/clinton-i-am-not-a-lesbian/ ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 16:49:01 +0000 From: Michael Sweeney Subject: Re: tl;dr episode iv: fat bob strikes back Jeff ("an interesting") Dwarf wrote: >Michael Sweeney wrote:>> kevin said:>>>Marcy Playground...>>> So I should be glad that I've never to my conscious knowledge>>> heard these guys?>> >> ...Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing myself (but maybe I>> have and just don't know it)... >>http://youtube.com/watch?v=CKl_7zK3fbI >>I always thought of it as more bland than aggressively terrible. I >can certainly think of a fair number of one hit wonders from that era >I thought of as much worse. Nothing great, but at least it's not Deep >Blue Something "Breakfast at Tiffany's." ...thanks for the link... 1. I guess I _had_ heard it before, but... 1a. Not all that much, and... 1b. It doesn't bother me (it's not so bad -- if slight -- if you haven't been saturated), but... 1b. I am cardigan-and-shotgun hard-pressed to see how anyone could confuse that with Nirvana... 2. Deep Blue Something "Breakfast at Tiffany's"? Argh! Now _that's_ a fate nearly worse than death... Michael "In my head now: '...and I said, "What about 'Breakfast at...'"' - curse you, Jeff Dwarf!!!" Sweeney ps - nice quotation mark gymnastics, eh? _________________________________________________________________ Capture your memories in an online journal! http://www.reallivemoms.com?ocid=TXT_TAGHM&loc=us ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:53:29 -0400 From: blatzman@aol.com Subject: Days of Buster Thank goodness Rex was there to witness the strange things that went on with Buster... I know it sounds unbelievable, and I probably wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it over and over again... Believe it or not, I left out the craziest parts for fear that the story would just sound too fantastical... But today, I present it to you. Everything that I am going to tell you is true. This is not for the faint of heart. If you are easily disturbed, stop reading now... You have been warned... Ally McBeagle she was one stubborn bitch. We thought if we got her a companion that she would behave. So, we went to a beagle rescue center and found a charming 6 month old puppy named Buster. Buster and Ally became the best of friends and bonded in a way that made it impossible to separate them. A few weeks after we brought Buster home, I found him taking a dump in our Kitchen. Oh well, I thought, puppies will be puppies... I went to get something to clean it up, but when I returned, the turd had mysteriously disappeard. Buster gazed up at me with a helpless stare... Tina immediately called a vet and screamed into the phone "My dog ate his own shit! IS he going to die???" The vet chuckled and explained that this behavior was very common in beagles and that there was nothing to worry about. As time went on, we got another dog named Smidgin, a dachshound... Smidgin and Buster both became fond of Allys droppings... In fact, they each had their preferred method of dining... Smidgin would ONLY eat the ones that had been baking in the sun for at least a day... Crunchy on the outside, creamy on the inside we used to say... Buster on the other hand liked them hot out of the oven... He wouldn't touch the sun-baked variety... One day, I looked into the backyard and found Buster eating "straight from the tap"... Poor Ally was reelling around trying to stop Buster, but he was a man on a mission. I think it was his way of getting to the treats before Smidgin could... From that point on, Buster would follow Ally everywhere, waiting for the moment when she had to take a dump... At his point we knew something had to be done. In a fit of rage, I took some tabasco sauce, walked all around the yard, and covered each turd in a bath of the steamy hot sauce. The next morning, the backyard had been picked clean... It was as if we had given them an extra special treat... "Spicy"!!!! I went to Petco and purchased this special packet that I put in Ally McBeagle's food... it was $4 per packet mind you, and it was supposed to make the shit inedible... Well... not for Buster... He lapped that crap up faster than ever as if I had prepared a special exotic dinner!!! Cajun Style, mmm mmm mmm!!!!! Busters fudge-fiend days got so bad that he stopped eating real food. Why eat that Petco garbage when you can load up on treats in the backyard!!! Perhaps the most disturbing thing of all was when Buster would overindulge in the backyard bakery and get a tummy ache... He'd eat so much crap he'd litereraly make himself sick... He would throw up the shit he had eaten, then quick as he could, eat the puked-up shit before anyone else could get to it. Let me assure you, I have seen many disgusting things as a dog owner and a parent. Buster eating the shit he had just puked up remains one of the most disgusting things I've ever witnessed. He'd just look up at us with this pathetic "I CAN"T HELP MYSELF" stare... The only real way to deal with it was to joke about it. I used to imagine what Buster and Ally would be like if they were in a Rock Band... And thus, I imagined "Ally and the Flavorchews"... If they could play music, they'd sing something like this (to the tune of Season in the Sun) "We had joy we had fun, they were baking in the sun. All the treats that we found were just lying on the ground Some Have cream, some have crunch, you can find them by the bunch Cause wherever Ally sits you will find sweet golden bits" Or perhaps the single off their second album (to the tune of Deja Vu) "Deja Poo, could this be the fudge that I once chewed... Deja Poo" And we even came up with an expression that use to this day... When someone is really annoying you, you say "Quit bustin the Fudge". or... "Stop bustin it!" Which of course means absolutely nothing, but is kind of fun for my family in that in-joke kind of way... So please don't hate me. Don't think me evil. Yes I punished Buster out of his fudge-friendly ways and believe me, it was totally against his will... But really I did for the children. Blatzy ________________________________________________________________________ Email and AIM finally together. You've gotta check out free AOL Mail! - http://mail.aol.com ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V16 #346 ********************************