My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The best thing about this book is the title – it’s quite witty. Trying to convince readers that if it wasn’t for Judaism, Lenny Bruce or Hitler, there wouldn’t have been punk rock, or that if he hadn’t been Jewish, Joey Ramone wouldn’t have become the Godfather of punk is a real stretch. In fact, most of the book reads like a compendium of castoff lines from Seinfeld or Shecky Greene – “it’s our musicality and punkishness that has sustained us as a people for 2000 years. . . ” The Yiddish expressions throughout the book get really annoying after a while too. You almost need a Yiddish – English dictionary to figure out what Beeber is saying sometimes – in places it reads a bit like an inside joke that non-Jews are not privy to.

Anyhow, be sure to read a preview of this book before you buy it – I found it quite boring and difficult to wade through all of the specious attempts to demonstrate that punk rock would not have happened were it not for “punkish” Jewish kids or agitators like Malcolm McLaren. For a much more interesting read about the New York punk scene, read Micky Leigh’s “I Slept with Joey Ramone.”

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The Left Banke Version
The Dickies Version

“First of all, we must make a distinction between subsistence hunters and sport hunters. Most hunters in North America kill animals not for survival, but for recreation. They like to get together with their friends, drink lots, and go out in the woods and shoot animals. They have a lot of fun doing it. The only North American hunters who really need to hunt are some First Nations people living in remote areas who hunt for a source of meat.”

“Not even First Nations people, however, are immune from poaching. In spite of their claims of being at one with nature, First Nations people are regularly busted for poaching. There is a booming trade in illegally obtained eagle feathers and body parts that are used in costumes for pow wows. In fact, it could be argued that even in pre-contact times, First Nations people didn’t really live in harmony with nature. Case in point – buffalo jumps where hundreds or even thousands of animals were stampeded off of cliffs. There was no way that all of the animals could be butchered and the meat and skins used. Archaeological evidence shows conclusively that animals were often stacked upon each other, and the animals at the bottom of the pile rotted long before they could be used. Technology was really the only limiting factor that prevented traditional cultures from driving many species to the point of extinction. If they’d had firearms, the plains peoples might have exterminated the great buffalo herds without the help of Europeans. In fact, it’s quite possible that the herds of Mammoths and Mastadons that once roamed large areas of the globe weren’t killed off by climate change, but by early hunters.”

“I’ve known a great many hunters over the years, and every one of them admitted to poaching from time to time. Some just couldn’t resist shooting an animal that they’d never killed before. Others didn’t want to go home empty handed, so they shot an out of season animal that just happened to be standing by the road. The reality is, in spite of claims to the contrary, poachers are hunters and sadly, many hunters are poachers.”

So, it was with great expectations that I loaded the cd into my player and prepared to be amazed. A few minutes later, I was thinking to myself “man, this is a piece of crap.” I did a quick search on the internet to see if maybe I had confused Pet Sounds with another album that was actually good. Nope, this was supposedly one of the best albums of all time.

Now, to be fair, there are a few great songs on Pet Sounds - Wouldn’t it be Nice, Sloop John B, and God only Knows are awesome songs, but the rest just are not that great. I suppose that at the time it was recorded the album was pretty revolutionary. The Beach Boys, and by that I guess I mean Brian Wilson, experimented with home made instruments and sound bites like barking dogs to record the tracks. Some of the same techniques appeared on Sgt. Pepper. Maybe that’s why Pet Sounds is considered to be one of the greatest albums of all times – because it was something pretty new even though most of the songs suck.

So, I would encourage anyone who reads this to listen to Pet Sounds and decide for yourself if this one of the greatest albums of all time, or, if as I think, a piece of crap.

Good on you Mr. Purewal. While the Wicked Scholars are not homophobes, we do agree that from what we’ve seen of gay pride parades, they often seem to descend into some pretty obscene displays of deviant sexual behaviour and promiscuity that simply do not belong in public. Who really wants to see a bunch of guys in banana hammocks gyrating and touching each other in naughty ways. If the gay community wants to be accepted (and not be made fun of or held in contempt by society at large), perhaps simulating gay sex acts on a parade float is not the way to go about it.

Now, if there was a pride parade just for hot lesbians, that would be awesome!

At any rate, we find the show really creepy and gross, and hope that it gets cancelled soon because we can’t imagine anyone watching it, except for maybe people who live on the bayou.

Lately, we’ve been finding ourselves yelling at the tv, admonishing customers not to sell their items for the frequently bargain basement prices being offered by the guys in the Pawn Shop. So, we have decided to make this public appeal. If you’re not happy with what Pawn Stars is offering, send us an e-mail and if it’s something we’re interested in, maybe we can pay you more. We are interested in antiquities, pop culture, militaria, edged weapons, anthropological items, and so on. Case in point, on a recent show, the shop paid $600 for a cool electric car. We would have paid way more than that.

If you have something and you don’t know what it is, send us some photos, maybe we can tell you what it is. If it’s something we would like to add to our extensive collections of the rare, valuable, and arcane, perhaps we’ll make an offer. If anyone has a copy of the Necronomicon that they want to sell, we’re definitely interested.

The Wicked Scholars are pretty certain than Nathan will get off with a little slap on the wrist, in spite of the fact that starting fires during riots can kill people (three innocent women burned to death this year when Greek rioters set fire to a bank), but the bigger issue for us is why is Water Polo even an Olympic sport?

How many people in the world play Water Polo, much less watch it as a spectator sport? Does anyone read the Water Polo scores in the sports pages? Why is Water Polo, a sport that clearly very few people in the world care about an Olympic sport at all? It seems like Water Polo is one of those lame ass sports like speed walking that only rich people at Ivy League Universities like. It became an Olympic sport in 1900 and like archery, skeet shooting, and speed walking, it’s almost impossible to remove from the Olympics even though worldwide, probably about 500 people watch it. Why would any country even put tax payer money into a sport like this?

So, one of Canada’s sporting elite is an alleged arsonist. Maybe the real crime here, however, is that taxpayer money is going to support a useless sport like Water Polo.

Vancouver British Columbia is a beautiful city with a fragile veneer of urbane sophistication that for some reason is so easily fractured. This was not the first time a Stanley Cup riot has occurred in the city – the last one was in 1994. There have been other riots there, however, and even a fireworks display has been known to result in rioting and property destruction. To be fair, hockey riots have occurred in other cities, for example Montreal, but there has never been a Stanley Cup riot in any of the American NHL cites. Canadians have a reputation for being polite, peaceful people, yet riots and other acts of violence seem to becoming more and more common there. We asked Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, Professor Emeritus at Miskatonic University why riots seem to be a common occurrence in Vancouver.

“Canadians were polite and peaceful people – 50 years ago. Now they can outdo Australians for hooliganism and stupid rednecked behavior. Vancouver is a beautiful city with a very temperate climate compared to the rest of Canada. A lot of rednecked losers want to move there so that if they end up living on the streets, they won’t freeze to death. Many of the people who live in Vancouver have a very arrogant attitude. They think they’re better than everyone else. They especially hate eastern Canadian cities like Toronto. There is this real inferiority complex that can be manifest in senseless outbursts of violence. They want everyone to think that Vancouver is best, and yet they turn around and trash it or damage its reputation in the worldwide media. A lot of the people who live in Vancouver are relative newcomers. They have no roots or civic pride. Their loyalties are elsewhere. To them, Vancouver is just a place to hang their hat. There hasn’t been a Stanley Cup riot in an American city even though the cup is usually fought for between US based teams and American teams dominate the league. Could it be because American hockey fans are more mature, more sophisticated, and have be better developed sense of civic pride? There are also a lot fewer losers in the US than there are in Canada.”

One positive thing about this story is that everyone who took part in the looting and property damage was photographed multiple times and the police will start making arrests shortly. We can’t wait to see what happens to the retard photographed lighting a police car on fire. Hmmm, what kind of jail time does an arsonist get in Canada?

Then, he became a boring old gay man. Not sure when it happened, but we noticed a change after Lady Di died. Now, whenever Elton is seen in public, the emphasis is not on his music, but on his gayness, his wealth and success, his boyfriend and his new baby. He recently hosted SNL and pretty much everything he said had anal sexual innuendo. Of course, everyone in the audience cheered wildly whenever he made some kind of icky inside joke about anal sex or how rich he is, using the platform to stick it to everyone who criticized or made fun of him over the years.

Okay Elton, we get it, you’re gay. It’s been the worst kept secret in entertainment for about, oh I don’t know, the last 40 years (even when he got married to a woman in 1984, it didn’t fool anyone). It’s great that you’re liberated now and not afraid to tell the world that you’re gay (like we didn’t know), but now, it’s time to get back to what made you cool in the first place, and that’s not being a boring old gay family man.