Funny

Throw back the little ones and pan-fry the big ones

Bloody Lawyers, Fans are slans!, Funny
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Is it hip to be a Steely Dan fan again yet? Whether it is or no I’ve always liked them and I’ve been relistening to Aja lately, which is why this odd little snippet of gossip in the Grauniad caught my eye:

Please, if anyone knows what Steely Dan duo Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are on or up to then let us know. As previously reported they recently wrote an open letter to actor Luke Wilson complaining that his actor brother Owen used their song Cousin Dupree as the basis for his character in You, Me and Dupree. Now they have posted an 1,800 word open letter to Wes Anderson, who directed the Wilsons in The Royal Tenenbaums and Bottle Rocket. “Surely,” they write, “we are not the first to tell you that your career is suffering from a malaise.” They then write suggested lyrics for Anderson’s next film and end up asking that a cheque for $400,000 (?210,000) be FedExed to them.

I sensed some backstory here, so I did a little google. Here’s the full text of the letter to Luke Wilson. nd here’s the letter to Wes Anderson. I love the language, very 1975.

It’s like a little window back in time. Pass the bowl man. The whole thing’d be kinda sweet, if it weren’t just so goddamned breadheaded.

The whole letter reads like a comedic screenplay. In my mind’s eye I see Donald Sutherland as Fagan and Kevin Spacey as Becker ( ymmv, obviously) but I’m really not quite sure about the director … the Coen brothers maybe, or the Farrelly’s or some other indy-type sibling duo. Perhaps that’s just a tad obvious. I know who – Kevin Smith! Dude! Whatever, it just has to have a crazed John Goodman in it somewhere. He’d be perfect as as the psychotic Russian hired muscle… I’m feeling the excitement here, this could be a real pitch. Major studios please note, I thought of it first.

See how it works? Little fleas have bigger fleas upon their backs to bite ’em and bigger fleas have bigger fleas and so ad infinitum. I await my royalty demand from Becker & Fagan with bated breath.

Read more: Music, Gossip, Steely Dan , Seventies Nostalgia

A joke

Funny
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George Bush is visiting a class at his old primary school. After a short speech, he ask the children if they have any questions.
Laura raises her hand and says.

“I have three questions for you.

1. How did you manage to win the elections with less votes than Al Gore?

2. Why do you want to invade Iraq without a good reason?

3. Do you think, as I do, that John Ashcroft, not terrorism is the greatest threat to our freedom?”

At that moment, the bell goes for the morning break. All the children leave class to play outside.

After the break, Bush again asks the children if they have any questions. This time, Jeb raises his hand and asks:

“I have five questions for you.

1. How did you manage to win the elections with less votes than Al Gore?

2. Why do you want to invade Iraq without a good reason?

3. Do you think, as I do, that John Ashcroft, not terrorism is the greatest threat to our freedom?

4. Why did the bell go twenty minutes early?

5. Where’s Laura?”

Shorter Den Beste

Blogs, Funny, Wingnuts
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D-Square Digest is going to provide a much needed service:

As part of my New Year’s Resolution to pick a really nasty fight with someone, and as a potential supply of more regular updates, I’ve decided to become a “watcher“. I believe that this was all the rage in weblog circles about a year ago.

Anyway, I want to do it, and nobody convinced me that there were better targets for a jihad than Stephen den Beste, so I picked him. It also helps that, as far as I can tell, he’s incredibly thin-skinned (see my comments board somewhere for proof). Now, I thought of doing “Smarter Steven den Beste” (note that part of my strategy is not to use a consistent spelling of his first name), but that would probably completely dominate my blog, and besides “fisking” is like so five minutes ago. (Being a “watcher”, however, is retro and cool).

Besides, people don’t necessarily want a Smarter Stephen den Beste. Part of the joy is watching a man who knows nothing about anything except the innards of mobile phones trying to understand a complicated world around him with no sources of information other than the Internet. What people want is a Shorter Stephen den Beste; one that doesn’t take about ten thousand words to get from A to halfway through the downstroke of B. So I’ll be posting one-sentence summaries of posts on the USS Clueless, on a reasonably regular basis, until I get bored.