May 2003 Archives

Last night's Daily Show had what was possibly the funniest, and the most horrible scene I have ever seen. It was a clip from a CNN report about American control of the Iraq Oil Ministry. The U.S. Army guy in charge (a real whacko young, bald guy who seemed hopped up on something, and should have been at Burning Man looking for girls to show him their tits) was getting a report on the days production from the Iraqi in charge.

When the Iraqi reported 500K barrels had been produced that day, the Army dork whooped and hollered "Woooo 500 thousand Barrels of Oil! I think I owe you something!" and he turns around and hands the Iraqi...4 cookies that his mother-in-law in Wisconsin had made.

The Iraqi gentleman, and his associates looked...what...non-plussed pretty much sums it up I guess.

500K barrels of oil - 4 cookies.

Is it any wonder that they hate us? Not only are we occupying their country, we are also condescending bastards.

What was interesting was that The Daily Show really couldn't make any jokes about it - I mean, how could you possibly say anything that would make that scene funnier/weirder?

In a show of solidarity with fellow journalists Jayson Blair, and Stephen Glass, I have decided to come clean about the errors and fabrications that I have allowed to seep into the sacred news source that is edgore.com, depended on every day by ones upon ones of readers...

Saturday I reported that Moonpools and Caterpillars had put out only a single CD. I admit now that was a lie. They had two...in addition to Lucky Dumpling.

I actually even knew about one of them.

Why did I decide to withhold that information? Well...it was because the facts didn't fit the story I so desperately wanted to tell - a story that is, if you think about it, truer than the truth.

I wanted to tell the story of a tiny band, who hit it big in one album, then vanished into obscurity, only to later be searched on by bored people with empty lives, desperately looking for something to fill them.

No, I knew that the band had a first album - "The Pink Album", but it's hard to find, and I have never heard it. They also had a third album, "12 Songs" but I didn't bother to do any research, and frankly, still haven't.

So...why did I do it? Why did I take advantage of my readers, my site visitors, and Moonpools and Caterpillars themselves to create this tower of lies that has now had it's foundations sapped out by the tireless efforts of a single reader who would not give up on the truth?

Well, duh, because nobody actually reads this blog. Don't kid yourself.

Of course, even the person who pointed out they had more than one album thought they only had two, so nobody is perfect.

And I think that there is the lesson here - a lesson that we could all learn from, especially when we look at people like Jayson Blair, who made up stuff, and is now trying to get a big book deal, or Stephan Glass, who made up stuff, and actually DID get a mediocre book deal.

That lesson is this - Make stuff up. Nobody is really paying any attention anyway, and you might be a big book deal out of it.

Everyday I look at my logs and I see the things that people have searched for that brought them to my site. Most of the times it's pretty baffling why a particular search term brought someone to my site, or if I try the search myself, why the person clicked on my site on the 5th page of the search...

Anyway, I've decided to, every now and then, highlight things that I find that are, to me at least, particularly interesting.

This week, it's "Moonpools and Caterpillars" A band from southern California that appeared and disappeared in the mid-ninties. To the best of my knowledge they had one album - Lucky Dumpling - which was absolutely amazing. They also, in that brief period of time had advertising gigs with Coke and IBM, and seemed on the verge of making it big, when they decided that their lives were more important than their careers, and packed it in.

Anyway, over the last week 17 people were brought to this site by searching for them - more than anything else this week. They were probably disappointed to find only the entry in my CD collection with a one paragraph rave about the CD in it.

I hope this means that there is something going on with M&C- even if it's just getting airplay again - they were a great band.