First Annual Bad Idea Potluck Essay Contest

Write as much or as little as you want about your fondest memory of throwing up. Send a picture of yourself or don't. You can even just type it in as a comment after this post. Winners will receive an indie rock fun pak, hippie art or a paperback edition of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Contest runs 'til 2010 but winners will be announced whenever I decide.

Personal and the Pizzas

I really meant to try to take a picture during the Personal and the Pizzas show last night at the EARL but then I forgot. So I'm going to go with this picture of Iggy Pop eating pizza, which you could purchase in pin-form from the band. They are three greasy dudes with a pizza/chain whipping fetish. (You could also purchase a chain from them for $100.) Their show was kind of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon version of a garage band complete with goofy Fonzie accents.

Their best song is called "You=Beat Up." They claimed they couldn't play it and then they did just fine. Their second best song is called "I Can Read." I found that one very personally moving. Check it out on Myspace: www.myspace.com/personalandthepizzas

They are also nice and one even selflessly advised me that, if I had to choose between merch and beer, I should choose beer. I think he was the one who kind of looks like the crazy scientist from Repo Man. Hope they come back soon.

Awesome Water Cronkite Eulogy

www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/18/cronkite/index.html

Click on all the links.

Best Bad Idea Blog

Every Day Should be Saturday makes me want to hang up my guns. The Digital Viking installments dealing with food, beer, explosives and other such primal topics set the bar pretty high for me as far as bad idea writing goes. It's also where we got the bar stool below.

www.everydayshouldbesaturday.com

Dudecake

Why do I need to ransack the Internet to find an appealing picture of a dude with his shirt open? Maybe it's because, in the end, I am not that big of a perv. And neither are a lot of women who are straight or who have strong enough heterosexual leanings that they would, first, search for pin-up dudes and, second, possibly shell out for some. You kind of have to work for this stuff.

I started my search due to the conspicuous absence of the hot male form from my field of vision. I'm not talking real life, of course, I'm talking specifically about instances of sublime objectification. There just isn't enough of it. It's not in ads much, there's only a bit in the movies, even dudes in real life tend to cover it up (it's usually for the best, really) and a lot of the dude porn I do encounter is geared toward gay men or, so much worse, is cinema that explicitly claims to understand my desires and then hands me the iconographic equivalent of a car with a special place for me to put my purse.

I would like lots of pictures of semi-nude men tailor made to my sense of beauty, please. As in, like, not the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. And I don't want to have to work for them. Google "indie porn" and you will have to do a bit of clicking to find a boy. And when you do, you might not be that stoked on him. I know there is stuff out there and I will pay for it someday, but for now I'm a little annoyed that there is more cheesecake floating around for free.

The naked female form is generally mind-bendingly beautiful. But it's also everywhere. I have naked girl fatigue; believe it or don't. I know I'm not the only one because I have discussed this with my friends. I think the only cure is more naked boys.

Sweet Action Magazine had the right idea but the execution wasn't perfect. My favorite pornish zine is called Blam! Blam! but even that isn't quite what I'm talking about. Especially since I'm not talking about classy erotica. I'm not looking for anything artistic here, which is my problem with a lot of indie porn. Tom of Finland is my homeboy, but the closest thing I've seen to what I really have in mind are these Naked Men in Oven Mitts magnets from Blue Q.

So, all of this is why I'm kicking off my pin-up boy campaign right here on the potluck with a monthly pin-up boy item. I think I'll call it dudecake. The word beefcake doesn't have any appealing associations for me. It makes me think of meatloaf and that just isn't sexy. Not even in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

See you there.

Letters: Technology

This one comes from Sean in Atlanta. It is a motorized bar stool. It comes from THIS months old blog post. We never claimed to be a news source. We just want to bring a little beauty into your life.

July's Beer of the Month

July's beer of the month is the Hopsickle Imperial Ale from Moylan's Brewery in Novato, Calif. The Hopsickle wins because we are on a kind of West Coast kick and because it is distinctive and flavorful. But also because it inspired all of tonight's posts! Don't drink and blog, kids. Noodles shown for scale.

We were also pretty into this guy

Pet Cemetery

I'm cynical at all the wrong times. Like when people treat their pets like children and pay a lot of money to see them interred. But I think I might have been moved by the pet cemetery in the Presidio in San Francisco. There was something about standing on ground where the flowers had obviously been watered by the tears of children. And grown ups. The Presidio was a military base and so these were mostly army pets. But I got the feeling that if there was a time in the lives of Presidio army brats where you learned that crying showed unforgivable weakness it wasn't at Cindy Pooper's funeral. Plus, look at these headstones. If I get a headstone it will not be this cool. These are not even all the ones I wanted to post. Go to the pet cemetery.