Billy Ocean, where are you when we need you?

Augh, what a week. Grey, cold, forbidding weather and general malaise have got me down, my complexion is rebelling and I haven't felt awake since last year. More major work on the car today - it took four hours. Everywhere I go, they're playing '80s Springsteen. To think, I could be on the East Coast seeing Finntroll this weekend, or at least the Arsis ballet. Bah. Only something weird or awful can make me feel less lousy at this point.

Something Weird: Now that I control the TV, I'm that "what I want to watch, when I want to watch it" guy in the Comcast OnDemand commercials. "The Aviator," widescreen, for free, without having to rent or mail a DVD? That's technology at work. I've already watched a bunch of music videos and dating profiles (pure hilarity), all of "Six Feet Under" season two and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" season five, a bland Canadian documentary on early hip-hop and, out of curiosity, some glitzy Logo show about hot music for GLBTs. (I assumed it would be all lame dance music and bland rock. I was mostly correct, but at least it had a Sleater-Kinney video.) The greatest option is a recent OnDemand addition, Mike Vraney opening the insanely deep vaults of Something Weird Video for mass consumption. Having been a SWV customer since before they were pressing DVDs, this warms my heart. Right now it's mostly educational shorts, burlesque loops and atomic scare films, but I know what Vraney's hoarding. Someday, the average American will be able to call up "The Sinful Dwarf", "Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind" or "Psyched By the 4-D Witch" with the push of a button. Who says humanity already peaked?

Something Awful: This site isn't all so hot (lots of video game and insular internet content that I don't care about), but there are two excellent sections that provide lots of fun reading. The first is the infamous Your Band Sucks wing, which hurls eggs at all sorts of musical icons with precise, sarcastic equanimity. I even like the ones making fun of bands I like, such as They Might Be Giants or The Mars Volta, and the genre bashings are particularly great. But even better is The Horrors of Pornography, humorous reviews of some of the most unerotic raincoat pictures available, many of them naturally being Japanese fetish epics. My general impression of modern "adult titles" is they're as gross and humiliating as possible, as if today's hetero males simply prefer a bunch of spitting and retching and crying to boring old sex with a lady. They're special cases here, but these reviews confirm all I need to know, and it's nice to know someone else thinks this shit's as ludicrous as I do. However, Geist is wrong to assume the infamous "Café Flesh" was intended as a regular porn movie. Everybody knows the hardcore scenes were demanded by mob producers against the wishes of the filmmakers (among them Jerry Stahl, later played by Ben Stiller in "Permanent Midnight"). Those meat shots were intentionally unappealing in defiance of industry expectations, as opposed to the bizarre or nauseating stuff in the other movies covered.

Something musical: Ah, good clean anti-Commie metal. I got a pretty good instrumental demo by a Norwegian band called Naglfar a while back, and out of curiosity I looked them up on the web. Seems they only recorded two more songs after that demo, one some joke song at a live show. The other one, a lo-lo-fi studio job called "Burn To Return" (it might be "Born To Return," as it says on their site) is some sort of tribute to Rambo, complete with samples and incorporation of his theme music. I can't vouch for the political nature of this track, but as far as the song goes, I haven't heard something this whacked since Mindrot's sludged-up cover of "The A-Team" theme.