Joe Bush dot Net

One of the most ridiculous aspects – potentially the most ridiculous aspect – of American politics is the fact that every politician has to care about sports in order to appeal to the commoner. It’s one of the ways we keep them in check – politicians have the ability and zeal to vote to strip you of your right to clean water, but then we have to make them watch bad football so they can pretend to be one of us. It’s a tough road they walk, particularly if they live in a state with multiple teams, because you’ll face the fury of snarky fans if they pick the wrong one, and also face the fury of snarkier fans if they pick both.

I have to laugh so hard at the fact that Sam Brownback somehow found a shirt celebrating both Kansas and Wichita State in order to appease voters.

But to get right to the point of the article, one of the purest forms of American sporting pomp and circumstance is baseball’s ceremonial first pitch. It’s a classic, it’s America’s pastime, a perfect, purely for-show photo opportunity which can only go wrong if you fuck it up really badly. Just about every president since the beginning of baseball – sans the current one but give him time – had to go out and show some of their athletic ability on the mound for the appeasement of the people.

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I am but a man. I have my desires and my weaknesses. I have this website, and the other website, and a Hyundai, and very little else to draw off of for solace in times of darkness. In times of darkness, I curl into a corner and I become the frightened boy that I always have suspected I am.

The Cap’n, though… The Cap’n never has to change himself. The Cap’n has only ever had to be the Cap’n. When the Cap’n reaches his lowest moment, he seeks the solace of no corner in no dark room. When the going gets tough for the Cap’n, he appears within a giant sprinkled donut and gives to the world. He only creates. I only destroy.

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After like twenty five years going strong, my dad’s old Sony CD Player from his apartment after he graduated college has officially bitten the dust. It had a good life, but stopped reading discs last week. The final disc that it ever played was Talking Heads’ classic Speaking in Tongues, which may or may not be fitting because I’m not 100 percent sure of what my dad’s music tastes were in the late eighties and if a copy of that CD would’ve found its way into that tray at any prior point.

Anyway, my system of playing CDs had to be severely changed, and it eventually became an old Craig Electronics (a brand that is still around even though they apparently do not have a Wikipedia page in the year of the Common Era 2017) portable CD player hooked up to an amplifier via the aux cord I took out of my car.

The years between end of the cassette walkman era to the beginning of the iPod era must have been horrible because you have to hold this thing perfectly flat all the time

Now, this actually worked fairly well for two reasons

1. The quality of sound coming from the CD player was actually pretty solid all things considered.
2. I would otherwise have absolutely no use for my Craig Electronics portable CD player.

So my need for a CD player was, oddly enough, basically sated by this method. As a stopgap, this will work fine.

However, knowing that my audio setup was being affected in this manner brought one of my longest standing frustrations out to the forefront:

I have no manner to properly play cassette tapes.

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Kellogg’s is back, and boy do they have a new cereal! It’s an update on the old favorite Frosted Flakes, adding a hint of that delicious root (I think it’s a root), Cinnamon, to the sugary glaze that already covered the corn flakes. You know the full name in fine print is actually “Frosted Flakes of Corn”? I don’t understand why they make that decision or why anyone would think that I’d mix it up with anything like Frosted Flakes of Bran or if there are any other Frosted Flakes of anything on the market.

But regardless, it’s here, and it’s got cinnamon, and I’m ready to crunch and munch and hopefully forget all of the very bad things that are at play all of the time. Continue reading →

Folks, we’ve been played again.

I wanted an NES Classic last year. It looked like Nintendo doing two things that I thought they couldn’t do – They produced a console that people wanted, and they acknowledged and appreciated their history. The NES Classic seemed perfect, really. Sixty dollars, twenty games, compact, and easy to use. This would have been good for anybody – Casual players who just wanted something easy to access, devoted fans who wanted to give money for their favorite classic games, parents with young kids who were just starting out with video games, and I could think of several more situations where a product like this would be valuable. This should have been a huge hit, and by all counts, it seemed to be.

I tried to get an NES Classic last year. I didn’t get one. A lot of people tried to get an NES Classic last year, and didn’t get one. Many of those people got angry. I feel like I got detached. Not enough consoles were made to meet demand, and the ones that were were quickly snapped up by scalpers and collectors looking to flip the console for more money come the holiday season. After the controversy surrounding the launch, Nintendo promptly stopped manufacturing and selling the console. EBay listings for the NES Classic are still around three to four times as much as the MSRP at launch at the least. The publicity around the NES Classic was horrible.

Then, Nintendo had the hubris to do it to us again. They announced a sequel, a Super NES Classic, featuring a release of the previously unreleased Star Fox 2, two controllers right out of the box, and, according to Nintendo, none of the dirt that came along with the NES Classic.  Continue reading →

HEE HEE!

ATTENTION HUMANS, DOGS, LIZARDS, AND ANY OF THE OTHER BEINGS THAT LIVE IN THE EARTH BENEATH THE BURN OF THE SUN’S BENEVOLENT GAZE:

TODAY, I, LUNARIO, THE WIZARD OF THE MOON, WILL FINALLY ENACT ON MY MILLENIA-OLD PLAN TO THIEVE THE RAYS OF THE YELLOW STAR SOL FROM THE DAMNED INHABITANTS OF THE FALLEN PLANET “EARTHE”! THE EARTHLINGS STAND NO CHANCE AGAINST MY EVIL MAGICK Continue reading →

We’ve all been to the ‘Bees at some point in our life. I have many times, and I don’t regret many of them. Some of them, sure. The worst of them? Absolutely. The time that I locked myself in the bathroom with a Quesadilla Burger and didn’t come out for forty five minutes having changed into new clothes that I brought in one of them canvas Wal-Mart bags but didn’t bring back out? Only slightly. That was a tough time in my life and that was premium self-care, which the internet tells me is important.

But it’s no secret that Millennials are skipping Applebee’s. People keep asking me about this for some reason, and I’ve come to my own conclusions… Continue reading →