Dear Democratic primary,
You make me tired.
Please end as soon as possible, because I really don’t care who wins. Because I have this (very odd and potentially false) sense of confidence that no matter who the nominee is, he/she will beat John McCain.
I’d like Barack to win just because I think he’d blow it out of the water, but at end of the day it does not matter.
Just stop.
Love,
DAN
Odds and ends that didn’t fit anywhere else.
On a side note, this whole project was inspired by this first track. I played TATU at a local watering hole a few months back, just because I wanted to fill the bar with awfulness. Less than a minute into the song, an employee of the bar unplugged the jukebox to stop it from playing.
More than any other category, I think Power Pop defines “Room Clearer” for me. Whereas many of the previous songs were bad songs that I found myself liking, these are songs that I start out liking and then feel bad about it later.
At least one of these songs really spoke to you back in the day. Don’t even front.
For our first installment, we’re going to start off with a bang. Below, you’ll find ten tracks that are all awful in their own unique ways. Some are too cheesy to embrace (#1), some have just not aged well (#3), while others were pretty spectacularly wretched when they first debuted (#7).
I strongly recommend watching the YouTube clip for #10.
(PS — a lot of you may find yourself saying, slightly defensively, “Hey! I love that song!” To which I say, “Yes. Of course. We all do. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s mostly awful.” I think the best Room Clearers are effective because there’s 10-20% of you that actually likes it.)
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I am very much against the complicated straight guy handshakes. I thought of this while watching John Stewart and Jake Gyllenhaal greet each other during Jake’s recent appearance on The Daily Show.
I just can’t keep up when meeting young straight fellows and they greet me with a complicated series of shakes, finger-grabby thingeys, fist-knocks, etc. It’s too much — I just can’t keep up.
As a red-blooded gay male, I know what I like and what I don’t. I like my t-shirts fitted, my parfaits with blueberries and raspberries and my hand-shakes direct, straightforward and uncomplicated. Please cut me some slack.
I’m really against whistling on deserted streets.
Last night I was walking around downtown on one of the side streets that connects 15th and 14th and there was a guy in the distance whistling a meandering, lonely tune. In instances like this, the part of my brain that escalates bad situations to crises went into overdrive. I’m not going to get murdered for my wallet, like a normal person. It’s going to be some sort of circus freak with a bundle of candy canes in one hand and a paper bag with a head in it in the other.
But that didn’t happen. Luckily.
Summer vacation has blown thus far, as it has entailed:
Send boys, chocolate, mix tapes, or some combination thereof.
