It is dark in the woods and sometimes freaky.

I spent X-Mas weekend back at my parents' house, off in the woods in the deep, dirt-road rurality. Stuck without a driver's license I get a little too into Dad's fully-stocked basement bar and a little too into the backwoods paranoia that can creep up on you out there. Without around-the-clock near-daylight conditions like we have in town I am prone to nighttime cigarette breaks that involve partial hallucinations. I have in fact seen a UFO out there, have woken my mom up to tell her that, and have had to convince her that I wasn't on drugs. I err on the side of caution when it comes to these freakouts. Until I'm absolutely sure that the piece of ice over isn't a crouching, attack-ready possum, I'm not going to take my eyes off it. I don't know how many of you have any experience being trapped inside of a building by stalking possum, but it teaches you some respect for a marsupial's potential violence.

If you want your iTunes to look like mine

Van Morrison "Want A Danish?"
Bloody Hollies "We're So Anxious"
Blood Brothers "Love Rhymes With Hideous Car Wreck"
Death From Above 1979 "Blood On Our Hands (Justice remix)"
David Banner "Certified"
Dennis DJ & MC Cabo "Tire A Camisa"
Kiss Me Deadly "Dance 2"
Mississippi John Hurt "Louis Collins"
Magnolia Electric Co. "Hard To Love A Man"
John Lennon "Bring On The Lucie (Freida People)"
Mannequin Men "Honey, I'm Dead"
Nightmare of You "I Want To Be Buried In Your Backyard"
the Fall "I Can Hear The Grass Grow"
Mean Reds "Minor Threat"
Xiu Xiu "Bog People"
The Robot Ate Me "Angel In The Snow"
Silver Jews "How Can I Love You If You Won't Lie Down?"
Diamond Nights "Dirty Thief"
Immaculate Machine "Broken Ship"
Celebration "Holiday"
Bloc Party "Pioneers (M83 remix)"
Vladimir Horowitz "Etude In C Minor Op. 25 No. 12" by Chopin

The low-end tech graveyard that we call home.

Despite our plans currently in the works to score a budget-priced widescreen HDTV monitor (the original plan of copping a resonable-sized television that would go on a little rolly-cart having been squashed by the sheer mass of cheap, ridiculous TVs on the market), the technology sitch around Casa Borracho is pretty janky at the moment. JR's iBook took a major shit last week, matching my own iBook's late-summer shit-taking, so we are currently time-sharing a lime-green iBook on loan from Hopper. OS 9.2 in full effect, full-time with the shitty Internet Explorer that is basically like our wireless router broadcasts the internet back to 1985 and we're supposed to blog from there, all discussing how Reagan sucks dick and how in a few years everyone's gonna be wearing Hypercolor sweatshirts. Apple had better release Intel chip PowerBooks before we revert to some Amish-style level of tech around here. I don't want to find myself having a serious debate with JR as to whether zippers are the devil's work.

The Diabolical Clinton Biz

Two of the main points Hillary Clinton made during her couple-a-minutes speech at a Crobar event in honor of her senatorial-not-we-repeat-not-presidential-campaign-she-is-not-running-for-president-seriously-not even-thinking-about-it fund-raiser event at Crobar the other night: the deficit is seriously like WTF, and young people are the future. The remaining point she made is that Chicago is a great city that is great to be in. No mention of the war, and they cleared the protesters away before most members of the press arrived, but my co-workers snagged some pics. The high point of the evening is when Biz Markie induced probably several severe coronary episodes by referring to Hillary over the PA as "Our next president-esident-esident" (complete with Biz-generated faux Yankee stadium reverb effects), then played the intro to "Crazy In Love" as she came out of the secret passage she used to enter the club. The low point was possibly when all members of the press were, immediately after Clinton's speechlet, ordered and, on occasion, shoved out the doors by Secret Service agents. But if you are into being all pissed off at the Man and the Pigs, it was kind of like a secret high point at the same time.

Do not bust that bullshit flavor at me.

We all know how tasty the peanut butter flavor Puffins cereal is, but do not think that just because the peanut butter flavor is the truth that you can go ahead and let them kick the honey rice flavor at you. The shit is heinous and nasty and it will wreck your afternoon, I swear.
Sal Principato from Liquid Liquid's coming to town tomorrow with his new project Electric Skin. You can read my writeup on it in this week's Reader. It's the first time that any Liquid Liquid-related project has hit Chicago, and it should be live. During my research for the article we discovered that Grand Royal's Liquid Liquid reissue is still essentially impossible to find on cd, but due to some weird twist of fate (or some bankruptcy-related inventory process) you can still cop it on lp at Grand Royal Direct. Is it worth twenty bucks to give your record geek bros jealous vinyl-boners? Some people would call it a steal.