1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 113 – The Rogue Ale Experiment
by Marty Schwartz on April 22, 2012
Today’s article is brought to you by the good people at the Rogue brewery. Today, as I write this, I am sampling their “Voodoo Doughnut” product, a bacon maple ale.
That’s right, I like a little bacon flavor in my beer. Those of you who read my love letter to bacon a couple weeks back will not be surprised by this. Unless you were previously unaware that such a …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 105 – Jazz Doesn’t Always Look Pretty
by Marty Schwartz on April 17, 2012
Having slipped off my raincoat and eased into my velvet-lined smoking jacket, I was clearly in the right mood for writing about jazz today. Luckily Ms. Wiki’s random needle gently lowered into the smooth grooves of a jazz album, almost as though she’d anticipated my wardrobe selection. I chanced upon When Lightn’ Strikes by Canadian country-jazz fusionist (and that really is not as awful as it probably sounds) Lenny Breau.…
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 95 – Who Do Jamu? Do You?
by Marty Schwartz on April 10, 2012
It’s only a matter of time before we’re all hopped up on jamu.
My Indonesian fanbase (and according to the figures before me, you all constitute a whopping 0.37% of my adoring millions) will no doubt agree with this. Jamu is old-school medicine, once (and still) sold by the Indonesian equivalent of shamans and witch-doctors and road-side Nerve Tonic scam-artists.
It’s mainly an herbal medicine, cultivated from various …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 86 – The Legend Of The Haunted eBay Painting
by Marty Schwartz on April 1, 2012
Bill Stoneham was just an artist.
Just an artist trying to make a living in the early 1970s in Los Angeles, painting mostly surrealist stuff he’d hoped people might want to hang on their walls. He didn’t invite evil spirits into his work, but they did him a fair bit of good when they showed up.
If you aren’t familiar with the story, then you may not have been …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 81 – Dreaming Of My Aero Skyblazer
by Marty Schwartz on March 25, 2012
Oh, the flying car.
It had to show up sooner or later. I’ve been bitching about the fact that we as a society have not moved on to the flying car ever since we started acquiring things that were cooler than the Jetsons, cooler than the future promised in Back To The Future Part II. Specifically, internet pornography. I mean come on. I can, with minimal research, track down video …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 74 – Lesser-Known Weirdness From The Monster Manual
by Marty Schwartz on March 18, 2012
At my high school, the kids who played Dungeons & Dragons were looked upon as outcasts, rejects from popular society, miscreants who couldn’t or wouldn’t adjust their hobbies to fit in with the mainstream. Of course, back then the mainstream looked like this:
This leads me to believe that the D&D-ers may have been on to something. I tried playing once or twice, but I didn’t have the patience to …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 67 – The Imp Of The Perverse: From Freud To Poe To Cheap Drugs
by Marty Schwartz on March 12, 2012
So you’re looking for an excuse for why your life is the way it is. You’ve made sketchy choices, unconscionable decisions, slept with partners of questionable ethics and species. That’s okay, you’re not alone. As with any E-Z diagnosis (especially one on the internet, especially-especially one from this site), you are not responsible.
Blame the Imp. The Imp of the Perverse.
If you’ve ever thrown your Mountain Dew …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 63 – So You’ve Decided To Become A Hip Hop Fan – A Helpful Brochure
by Marty Schwartz on March 4, 2012
Congratulations! You have just taken the first step on a long and exciting road to street credibility (or “street cred”, as the kids say). Let me “rap” at you for a minute about what you can expect.
Hip hop is not like it was in the olden times (the 1980s). Back then there were only two kinds to choose from: rap music and early dance music, which was like …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 55 – Pretending I’m Well-Read – The Books Of 1955
by Marty Schwartz on February 27, 2012
Wikipedia has a number of groupings by year – births, deaths, I even wrote about the news events of 1927 in one of my less memorable practice articles months ago. I was not aware, however, that they grouped the events in the literature world year-by-year. Now I am. So are you. I think you can see where this is heading.
1955. It was the year that gave us …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 47 – Getting A Texucation
by Marty Schwartz on February 19, 2012
How do I write an article about the education system in Texas without making derogatory jokes about the 43rd president or country music? Probably not going to happen, but I’ll try.
There are a number of entries about education in Texas. The first that caught my eye was something called ‘No Pass No Play’. No, actually the first thing I noticed was an item called ‘PEIMS’, because I …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 38 – Made For TV (For Now); Hollywood On The Small Screen
by Marty Schwartz on February 13, 2012
Is there anybody left who remembers Attack of the Killer Tomatoes? Keep in mind, I don’t mean this one:
I’m talking about this one:
The original Killer Tomatoes remains one of the finest B-movies in that smelliest of cinema vaults – really it’s a B-movie parody of the B-movie genre. It was released in 1978 and ascended to the high order of Video Cult Classic in the 80’s, along …
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1000 Words, 1000 Days: Day 32 – Lecture Series: “What’s Your Flava?” Literary Analysis
by Marty Schwartz on February 5, 2012
Today’s seminar will deal with one of the most important poets to have emerged from England since Sir Linchley Hassbrumley of Limerick delivered to the throne his epic Poeme regarding the well-fortuned lad from Nantucket: Craig David. He unfurled this bastion of artistic purity in 2002, lending vocals through his arguably douche-y jiffy-marker beard, and stunning the world with his viscous lyricsmithery. Behold: the majesty of “What’s Your Flava…
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