These Things Have Come To My Attention

Faith Comes By Hear­ing is a Chris­t­ian group that just sent 600 solar-powered audio-Bibles to Haiti.

I’ve done some math using these fig­ures to put that into perspective.

FCBH’s own web­site asks for a $157 dona­tion to send one “Pro­claimer” model audio-Bible to Haiti.

For the same cost, they could have bought 157 Red Cross dis­as­ter kits that con­tain the fol­low­ing: A cook­ing set, hygiene pack, blan­kets, water con­tain­ers, and a tent for a fam­ily of five.

That’s 785 men, women, and chil­dren who could have had the basic essen­tials for some­thing resem­bling life. Instead, FCBH thought they’d all be bet­ter off with the Word of God.

$157 (the cost of 1 Pro­claimer) could purify 52,333 liters of water, which is enough to keep 25 fam­i­lies of 5 hydrated until 2011. Instead of 600 Pro­claimers, FCBH could have kept 750,000 Haitians hydrated for a year.

The total cost to send 600 pro­claimers to Haiti was $92,000. In UNICEF’s hands, that money could have fed more than 1,000 chil­dren until the quake’s anniver­sary. FCBH feels it is more impor­tant to preach to their parents.

In 2008, I com­piled this hor­ri­ble list of the worst 10 X-Mas songs in human his­tory. Then I got bored and com­piled them all here in one post!

Every year, radio sta­tions and Muzak sup­pli­ers around the nation pull out the same mix CD of 12 X-Mas songs, and put them on loop for the 50+ days between Hal­loween and X-Mas day.

And so it begins.

#10: Dogs Bark­ing “Jin­gle Bells”

How do you improve on an annoy­ing 4-note melody that you’ve been hear­ing since the day you were born?

Easy. Have it sung by dogs.
This enoro­mous rein­deer turd first showed up in the states around 1955, brought over from Den­mark. You remem­ber Den­mark, their other notable con­tri­bu­tion to the world of music was Lars Ulrich. Every 10 years or so, this thing reap­pears in the pub­lic eye, as if we’ve never heard the damn thing before, and radio sta­tions around the coun­try think it’s the fun­ni­est thing since jokes, and the cutest thing since kit­tens. I pre­sume all of the nox­ious fumes gen­er­ated by the evap­o­ra­tion of Amer­i­can musi­cal iden­tity in nearly every FM sta­tion in the US is the cause of this short-term mem­ory loss.
A side story about sam­pling, which is what made this hor­ror pos­si­ble. The retarded wishful-thinking among us would like to believe that this was made by care­fully train­ing a pack of adorable pooches, directed by a con­duc­tor who used a bone for a baton. The more cyn­i­cal reader would believe that this was made by record­ing a bunch of dog barks, and care­fully arrang­ing them into the melody. Sadly no, this was most likely cre­ated with a sam­pler, like the Casio SK-1:

See how he recorded his idiot dog mak­ing an idiot bark, and then pitch-shifted it around so his idiot dog barked an idiot melody? Done. Mil­lion dol­lar X-Mas song cash-in. We had a few of these lying around the WIXQ offices dur­ing my tenure there, and we used to do this same sort of thing, but with fart noises, dirty words, and the occa­sional “________ is gay!” phrase.

Sim­i­lar tech­nol­ogy allows the lazy to bring you that “crazy robot voice sound” that all the kidz are crazy about these days.

salvador-dali

What list of Great Men with Great Mus­taches would be com­plete with­out Sal­vador Dali, mas­ter painter and jour­ney­man prankster? He was also the 1st Mar­quis of Púbol, which is amaz­ing because I didn’t think they made mar­quis­eseses anymore.

In honor of Movem ber, I’ll be post ing a new Great Man with a Great Mus tache every day. Please help fight prostate & tes tic u lar can cer by mak ing a small dona tion, and fol low my own Movem ber ‘stache here.

Sep­tem­ber 5, 1939 — Novem­ber 24, 1991.

In honor of Movem ber, I’ll be post ing a new Great Man with a Great Mus tache every day. Please help fight prostate & tes tic u lar can cer by mak ing a small dona tion, and fol low my own Movem ber ‘stache here.

Like many of you, I lis­tened to Weird Al before I was old enough to really get into music.  Music doesn’t really “click” with most of us until we hit our teenage years,  at which point it con­sumes us to the point of absur­dity (if you’ve ever drawn band logos on your his­tory note­books, you’re guilty).  Weird Al sub­ver­sively intro­duced me to hun­dreds of artists and sounds before I really dove into music, and in doing so prob­a­bly shaped much of my appre­ci­a­tion.  It was also the first con­cert I ever went to, at the TLA in Philadelphia.

For expos­ing kids to the depth and breadth of pop­u­lar music, Weird Al deserves a Great Man, Great Mus­tache honor.  Beyond that, he is an incred­i­ble musi­cian and come­dian.  It may seem triv­ial, but Al’s abil­ity to work within nearly any genre of music is no small feat, and a care­ful lis­ten will show that he is doing more than sim­ply chang­ing the lyrics.  He under­stands the tropes and con­ven­tions of the gen­res he par­o­dies in a way that many Juliard grads would not.

As a come­dian, Al has man­aged to keep the “Weird Al” char­ac­ter alive and rel­e­vant for nearly 3 decades.  Al is still work­ing hard today, record­ing and tour­ing, and enjoy­ing a upswing in popularity.

In honor of Movem ber, I’ll be post ing a new Great Man with a Great Mus tache every day. Please help fight prostate & tes tic u lar can cer by mak ing a small dona tion, and fol low my own Movem ber ‘stache here.