NutterBlog

Hey there. Excited for some nostalgia? Well for most of you, too bad, because we're talking about a year in music that happened a decade or to before you (or I) were born. But holy crap did it happen.

Anyhow, here's my picks for the 20 best albums of 1969:

19. The Band "Songs From Big Pink"

18. Joe Cocker "With A Little Help From My Friends"

17. Jack Bruce "Songs For A Tailor"

16. Pink Floyd "More"

15. The Doors "The Soft Parade"

The only Doors album with Jim Morrison on vocals that kinda sucks. Still, half of the songs are good, and it beats the crap out of the two albums they did after the Lizard King departed the earthly realm.

14. Frank Zappa "Uncle Meat"

Has its moments ("King Kong", "Dog's Breath (et. al.)" and "God Bless America" specifically), but is ultimately too fucked up to truly appreciate. (And once again, no, Frank Zappa didn't do drugs.)

13. The Who "Tom…

There were three pretty good Pay Per Views this month. WWE, TNA and ROH all put it down. Let's take a look at these fine cards and see which one (subjectively) came out on top:


Ring Of Honor (ROH): Best In The World 2012: Hostage Crisis

Location: Hammerstein Ballroom, New York, NYMatch Of The Night: Adam Cole VS. Kyle O'Reiley, Hybrid Fighting Rules MatchMain Event: Kevin Steen VS. Davey Richards, ROH World Title, No Disqualification Match Best In The World was a solid 7.5. There were some matches that were thrown together (Briscoes VS The Headbangers wearing masks, Mike Mondo VS Mike Bennet), and some that were okay, but kind of under-delivered (Michael Elgin VS Fit Finlay, The All-Night Express VS Charlie Haas & Sheldon Benjamin) But over all, it was a pretty solid card, and none of the matches flat-out sucked. I'd say Homicide VS Eddie Edwards and the Triple Threat TV Title match were pretty good, but the real highlights were the main event and Cole VS O'Rei…

There are all these stories, movies specifically, where the protagonist is getting picked on by bullies. The traditional ending is the good guy prevails and the bad guys get theirs. If these stories wanted a more worthwhile conclusion, I say the good guy and bad guy should come to an understanding instead. That's more interesting to me than the tired cliché of the bully being served their comeuppance.

Alas, revenge is far more popular a solution than understanding. Visceral reactions beat out reason and instant gratification trumps true fulfillment every time.

I understand the bully might not be capable of reasoning; they may not even see their prey as human. Also, people rarely ever "get theirs". (Justice is an abstract concept anyway; it's not something we can dollop out in exact measure.) But we can use this idea that understanding is ultimately more satisfying than revenge in our day to day lives.

It's the idea that conflicts can be resolved with reas…

I wanted to say something about this past weekend's Batman Shooting. Not a half hour after finding out about it, and while police hadn't even pulled the bodies off the crime scene, I noticed one of my Facebook friends had shared a post saying something to the effect of "DON'T LET THEM TAKE YOUR GUNS AWAY!!!"

Seriously?

The bodies are barely cold and this is already a gun law debate?

So I commented on the picture: "A bunch of people get killed and the first thing you think of is 'Don't take our guns away?' PEOPLE ARE DEAD." (Or something to that effect.) To her credit, she deleted the post shortly thereafter, which made me think "Oh. Cool. I must've gotten through to her. That's...more than I expected." Then I saw further down the page some other comment she'd made on a similar post on a friend's page that basically said the same thing and I ended up de-friending her. (I didn't know this person that well…

So MasterCard is doing this promotion where for every meal purchase you make with their card over $10, they'll donate one cent to Stand Up 2 Cancer, with a $4 million goal/limit. That's pretty cool, right? Charity for a good cause.

Not so fast. Let's break it down:

To hit $4 million, cardholders would have to spend $400,000,000. Not only that, but they have to spend that $400 million on meals over $10 exclusively. That's up to 40 million individual purchases. (Up to, because not all of them will be for exactly $10.)

MasterCard's third quarter net income last year was $717 million. This promotion is taking place from July 10th to September 28th, so if they make comparable numbers this year, that means roughly 56 percent of all charges made by MasterCard users would have to be meal purchases of $10 or greater in that three month window to hit four million dollars. In other words, not bloody likely.

So, knowing full well the math is against it, they put this p…