Go dress up!  And eat sugary things!  Or just stay home and get drunk!  Or go out and get drunk!  (please drink responsibly)  Or watch some scary movie marathon!  Or... whatever!

I'm probably just gonna give out candy to whatever crumb-crunchers knock on my door.  I give out good candy, of course - the assorted little Hershey bar-type thingies.  I don't give out mints or anything lame like that.  If any snot-nosed teenagers who didn't even dress up come by looking for handouts, I'll tell them to get lost.  Then I'm gonna pig out on whatever candy is left while watching Forbidden Zone again.

I like Halloween.

Watch a fanvid for "Halloween" on YouTube.

There have been several instances here where I would post a song from an album that contained a much more popular song, saying how much more I liked the song I posted than the more popular one.

In the case of the 2000 Bloodhound Gang release Hooray for Boobies (yes, that's actually what it's called), it turns out that I really dig the popular song, the satisfyingly bouncy "The Bad Touch."

Watch the video for "The Bad Touch" on YouTube.  They actually omitted "doggie-style"?  Ho boy...

Here it is with lyrics and better audio.

What would I do without the Fred channel (XM 44) and its tendency to unearth goofy early 80s new wave songs?  Before 10am this morning, I had never even heard of Psychotic Pineapple.

Are you listening, XM?  I know you're swimming in debt and your stock is in the toilet, and as such, you felt compelled to bump off some of your really good specialty channels so you could reach a larger, more contemporary audience.  You've already killed Music Lab, Special X and Fungus.  If you give Fred the axe, you're not seeing another dime from me.

Hear "I Wanna Get Rid of You" on Imeem.

Our company just had a huge pizza lunch.  Sometimes we get "safety bonuses" - if we go X number of months without any lost-time injuries, we get things like gift cards and catered lunches.

The pizza was passable.  I've had better, I've had worse.  But it was free, so I'm not complaining.  God, I stuffed myself.

I need a nap.

Watch a fanvid for "Pizza Day" on YouTube.

I believe this marks the second time I have posted both an original song and a cover of said song.  Oddly enough, "Baby Got Back" was the first one, and the Talking Heads tune "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" is now the second.  Seems like a rather odd pairing, to be sure, but hey, that's just the kind of guy I am.  I first heard this live Shawn Colvin version (from her 1994 all-covers album appropriately titled Cover Girl) when it was used in the film Wordplay (a documentary about crossword puzzles) and was impressed instantly by it.

It goes back to what I talked about earlier regarding the merits of "guy and guitar", or "girl and guitar" in this case - you cannot play and sing a song half-assed in that manner and expect me to just look past it and blow sunshine up your rear end over your lyrical prowess.  Your voice and guitar have to sound good.  You have to sing and play well.  And it helps to bring in a few more people, perhaps some string players or percussionists or maybe a second guitarist, to add some color and fill out your arrangement.  Then, and only then, will I even give an ass's rat about what you're singing about, even if you're covering a song I already know and like.

So yes, even though it's not really my thing, it is possible for a folkie-type to score points with me.  And this song did so in a big way.

Hear "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" on Last.fm.

Watch another live performance on YouTube.  Is it me, or has the Tube of You been pretty damned unreliable lately?

Sometimes all you want to hear is Les Claypool slapping the hell out of his bass for eight whole minutes.

Hear "Hamburger Train" on Last.fm.

This is part of week-long series on songs about trains.

I'm sure most of you have heard the Cat Stevens standard "Peace Train." And if you're like me, you're probably not too fond of its overdrenched syrupy hippiness.    10,000 Maniacs did a decent job with it, but they really couldn't save it either.  El vomito.

For me at least, that song was absolutely MADE by the Austin-based group WreckdoM.

Who??

WreckdoM (the capital M is not a typo, that's how they spell it) is certainly one of if not THE most prolific band on the Songfight web site.  In fact, they just submitted their 100th Songfight entry, with a song entitled "Shoelace Soup."  They're not everyone's proverbial cup of tea, and that's putting it mildly.  When they first started, well, I'll be blunt - they were pretty awful.  They took all kinds of abuse on the forums during their early Songfight tenure, but they just kept plugging away and plugging away, entering dismal songs week after week, ignoring the flamejobs and doing their thing.  I really began to admire their persistence and their attitude, even when I didn't like their music.

And as it often happens, at some point, they got better.  Once they finally started to grasp cohesive song structures and show some real musicianship, they started making some great stuff, making actual listenable songs to go along with their abject nuttiness.  They ended up winning their first fight with a hysterical song called "Punk Bartender."  They've even won a couple of more times since then.  Their evolution has truly been one of the more fascinating things to witness on Songfight.

They've done some really good covers, too.  They did "Peace Train" for the 2005 Gift of Music (I discuss the GoM in more detail here, and I discuss my entry for that project here), and they nuked that song so utterly and so wonderfully it became a huge Songfight favorite from that year.

I can't find a valid link for the song, so I am including it here as an attachment.  I'm MANLY!!

UPDATE (10/30/08):  Lo and behold, WreckdoM WON the "Shoelace Soup" fight!

This is part of week-long series on songs about trains.

In all honesty, I thought Megadeth's 1994 album Youthanasia was a bit of a letdown.  However, there were three tracks I really dug from it.  One of them I've posted already.  "A Tout le Monde" was another.  The other, hey, guess what?  It has the word "train" in it.  So it's going up today.

I'm always struck by the very beginning of this song's chorus, with that arpeggio with the major 3rd in it.  I can't really explain why that sounds so jarring, maybe it's because beginning a phrase by arpeggiating (for the non-musical, an arpeggio is when you break up a chord and play it note by note) a major chord isn't something metal bands do very often.  Way more often that's done on a minor chord as some sort of sad, ballady-type deal, but hearing it this way just sounds, well, different.

And that's not a bad thing at all.  Subtle, yet effective.

Watch the video for "Train of Consequences" on YouTube.

This is part of week-long series on songs about trains.