Friday Jukebox: Take it to the GW Bridge and stop

So I just found out that:

1) New Jersey is the only U.S. state without an official song.

2) Unlike our fine Oregon, my Oregon.

"Land of the Empire Builders, Land of the Golden West;
Conquered and held by free men, Fairest and the best.
Onward and upward ever, Forward and on, and on;
Hail to thee Land of Heroes, My Oregon.

Land of the rose and sunshine, Land of the summer’s breeze;
Laden with health and vigor, Fresh from the western seas.
Blest by the blood of martyrs, Land of the setting sun;
Hail to thee, Land of Promise, My Oregon"

Oregon, fuck yeah!

Sorry. Okay, back to Jersey.  

3) Apparently the last candidate was something called I'm From New Jersey by John Gorka, which is this thing:

I love this so hard. For one thing, how can you NOT love a "state song" that tells you about the actual, no-bullshit, way things are in the state it's about:

I'm from New Jersey
I don't expect too much
If the world ended today
I would adjust

 

I'm from New Jersey
No, I don't talk that way
I watched too much TV
When I was young

 

I'm from New Jersey
My mom's Italian
I've read those mafia books
We don't belong

 

There are girls from New Jersey
Who have that great big hair
They're found in shopping malls
I will take you there

 

I'm from New Jersey
It's not like Texas
There is no mystery
I can't pretend

 

I'm from New Jersey
It's like Ohio
But even more so
Imagine that

4) But. I see another contender for the Jersey crown; John Pizzarelli's I Like Jersey Best:

Which also goes hard in on the awesome lyrics:

"Lots of dineries, oil refineries,
Our highways make you cough,
But Spring Lake Heights and Belmar
Are places to get off.
Drinking spots and used car lots
Make the place just grand,
If you want to pay a visit,
Newark Airport's where you land."

So...such a choice!

Whaddya think? Deeply ironic and cynical, or just out-and-out funny? I mean...if you're gonna sing a song about your state, which way to go?

Hazy Shade of Winter

It was just less than a month ago that I posted pictures of the autumn drama at the Portland Japanese Garden.

Writing shit about new snow
For the rich
Is not art.
 ~ Robert Hass (supposedly a translation from 小林 一茶 (Kobayashi Issa)

As Kobayashi-san says; that shit's done with.

The weather has made a hard turn to winter. Mind you, it's winter in the Northwest, which means one of two things.

Typically it's an endless gray drizzle spiced with days of genuine hard rain. Low temperature 42, high temperature 44, rinse, repeat. That's the "west-wind winter".

Then every couple of weeks the polar high looms down over the intermediate space between the Cascades and the Rockies, over the high desert, and the east wind blows the clouds away and the cold in.

That's when you get mornings of freezing fog, and bright, chill afternoons that never let old bones warm, and my bones - those of which that aren't titanium aftermarket parts - feel very, very old on those sorts of days.

They're also not beloved of Portlanders, creatures of the Mediterranean that we are. So the Garden was quiet and I enjoyed the change from red and gold to spare black branches. 

Or bare red ones, as on the red-twig dogwood...

I should note that True Portland dies hard in the winter; this young woman attending the annual "Crafty Wonderland" fair refused to let the biting weather nip her toes back into closed shoes:

That's not actually an uncommon sight here (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about it somewhere but am too lazy to look...), the combination of a heavy sweater or jacket above some chilly pink toes below. 

Part of it may be hardiness, part of it may be unwillingness to surrender to the season. Part of it may be the simple ease of slipping into sandals rather than wrestling with heavy socks and shoes.

Whatever the reason, it's a thing, and a Portland thing, at that.

Speaking of Crafty Wonderland, several Portlanders took advantage of the seasonal surroundings to let some pretty serious Xmass-y freak flags fly.

One such was this gal; I couldn't get a great shot of her outfit but this gives you the idea - the entire front of her dress was an solid mass of Christmas-tree bling, like the gold-encrustation on Smaug's belly:

Plus glittery silver snowflakes in her hair. 

The effect was completely insane in a sort of holly-jolly way. The Nikes make it sort of Ugly-Christmas-sweater-casual. Fun look, but I sure couldn't pull it off. There's something to being cute and /or pretty that helps make "okay, that's freaky" into "awww...that's cute".

But the award for Most High-level Holiday Cosplay goes to the Elf Off The Shelf:

I don't want to show her face, so you miss the Santa-hat topping, but given the rest of the outfit you get the idea.

My favorite bit is from the hem to the floor; you got your saucy fishnets going for the whole "Santa Baby" frisky sex-under-the-Christmas-tree thing, but then you've got the massive engineer boots that add a touch of "...but-fucking-try-it-and-I'll-kick-your-fucking-ass" danger. 

Clearly this is someone who has the authority to get you on the Naughty List.

That's all for now.

This little post has been too much fun to load up with serious business, so I'll close with Christmas standard you know (It's the "Piano Guys" doing the Vince Guaraldi Peanuts tunes, and since Blogger is being a dick about letting me embed it, here's the link to copy and paste - https://youtu.be/tyPDQpel8bI and a finger to you, Blogger, for being dickish about this). 

But I will be back later in the weekend to discuss some of the nonsense that we're getting up to here in the Land of the East Wind Cold.

Back in a bit.

Interlude: Big Bang Crazy

I'm going to break off for a moment from the Real World and just rant for a moment, because I'm sitting here trying to read and my lovely Bride has turned on the fucking Big Bang Theory again.

She loves the hell out of this sitcom, and it's her single most go-to form of video entertainment, to the point where I can be at the far end of the house and hear the laugh track and know without a scintilla of doubt that it emanates from the fucking Big Bang Theory.

(Since I'm gonna be using this term a lot, let's save bandwidth and abbreviate it TFBBT.)

This sucker turns out to have been insanely popular - so she's not alone - ran for twelve seasons, and made big stars out of at least two of the leads; Jim Parsons as the male lead, Sheldon, and Kaley Cuoco as the female, Penny. Supposedly each of them (and Johnny Galecki, who played second lead, Leonard) made something like a million bucks an episode and they made over seventy of the bastards.

That's some serious jack.

And I don't get it.

I mean, de gustibus nil disputandem and all. But to have gustibus for TFBBT? Really? C'mon!

Seriously. The thing is just that bad. It's one of those painful trainwrecks that leaves you wondering if the writers and showrunners weren't missing out on their destined careers as housepainters, baristas, or grips on a porn film set.

To make matters worse, it's backed by a braying Sixties-sitcom-grade laugh track that just serves to point out how gawdawful the supposed-"jokes" are.

I have problems with about 99% of "reality" television because "reality" usually turns out to be a cast of variously-dysfunctional assholes being miserable to each other.

Christ, if I wanted that I could go to work.

Somehow TFBBT manages to combine the unfunny-ness of an unfunny sitcom with the trash human resource of your average "reality" show.

 No kidding. There's barely a salvageable human being on the screen.

"Raj" (a.k.a. "the Indian guy") is just an extended Apu joke; he's a whiny, clingy, constantly horny rich desi whose domineering parents bankroll his overseas adventures while his supposed American friends mock his race, his culture, his personality, and his pathetic attempt at a love life. The whole Raj idea should have been euthanized for the same reasons the Simpsons showrunners flushed Apu.

The three women characters are just different versions of female stereotypes; "Bernadette" is a ball-buster (who hooks up with the smarmiest male character) who improbably becomes the mommy-character, "Amy" is the girl-geek, all social incompetence and ugly clothes, and "Penny" is the hottie who uses her looks to gold-dig and manipulate.

The male leads are just punchable; "Howard" (the smarmy wanna-be-womanizer) is needy and whiny but with a nasty undertone, "Sheldon" is just a complete asshole who'd be shunned by normal humans, and "Leonard" is perhaps the worst of them all, a meeching little man who hates his roomate Sheldon's bizarre assholish behavior yet constantly defers, enables, and sucks up to him - why he'd want to stay "friends" with the gomer is beyond inexplicable. Leonard "gets" the hot girl Penny by lying and faking and pursuing her so relentlessly she just gives up and settles for him.

It's all just simultaneously sad and annoying, and my Bride loves it dearly, which makes it even more annoying.

And it re-runs constantly, so she can always find one playing somewhere, so as often as not the evening resounds with the braying laughter of TFBBT's idiot "audience".

Ugh.

I'm with you, Penny; rather than sit through a FBBT I'd spend the evening sanding my feet...

Friday Jukebox: Warning Signs Edition

 Fun rockabilly number for a sunny Friday afternoon.

Enjoy.

Talking about believing unbelievable things...

 ...here's the Little Cat being fooled by digital images of delicious prey:

I've seen videos of cats doing this, but I haven't before lived with a cat that was enticed by video images. Miss Lily loved to sit at the window and imagine massacring the feeder birds, but video didn't elicit the same response.

What was kind of fascinating is that The Girl played a whole series of these "cat video" clips, and the Little One's reaction to them was very different.

As you can see, the birds and rodents were boffo box office. She sat on the couch and followed the bird movements with her head as they flicked across the screen. But the rodents - a mixture of rats and squirrels - were utterly irresistible. She tried to catch them with her paw, and, finally, climbed up to the screen and tried to get behind it to where the rodents "were".

I'm not sure whether she was entertained by all this digital predation or just frustrated that she couldn't taste the sweet blood of her victims, but either way we all had quite the diverting half hour before we cut the cord, she looked at us with disgust, and jumped down to lick her backside.

Cats, go figure.

But now people? 

You'd think that almost two million years of evolution would make us harder to fool with digital simulation.

Friday Jukebox: Journey to the West Side of the Palace Edition

 I've got some fairly rough thoughts to put down about this coming Tuesday...but sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. I've had a lovely couple of days off this past Thursday and Friday, and I wanted to post something fun and lighthearted, so, this.

This is another one of those "anime music videos", or AMVs, and I love this one because the creator - "Sarah the Boring" - is anything but.

First, she took two wildly different anime and mashed them up into a "Prince and the Pauper" story, but which totally works, because of how similar two of the characters look.

Both are tall and skinny with long reddish hair. But that's where the similarity ends.

The scruffy looking pauper guy is from 幻想魔伝 最遊記, Gensōmaden Saiyūki, the anime version of the old, old story Journey to the West. He's Sha Gojyo (沙悟浄) and is some sort of weird human-demon hybrid. He's the Bad Boy in classic anime tradition:

The Prince is 桐生 冬芽, Kiryū Tōga...

...one of the characters from Revolutionary Girl Utena - 少女革命ウテナ Shōjo Kakumei Utena. This anime is described as "...follow(ing) Utena Tenjou, a teenage girl who expresses her desire to be a prince through her strong-willed personality and tomboyish manner of dress." 

Apparently there are sword duels - I've only seen bits and pieces of it.

Anyway, everything about this little AMV is perfect; the editing, the lip-synching, the mismatched-but-matching characters, and most especially the ridiculously goofy, poppy, hooky song "King of Spain" by some sort of Canadian novelty group call Moxy Früvous.

So for your Friday entertainment; "The Prince and the Kappa" - you'll have to follow the link to YouTube; unfortunately the creator won't let me embed it. But do, please; it's a fun Friday entertainment!

 

Back tomorrow with more serious content.

 

 

 

Friday Jukebox: アニメミュージック・ビデオ Edition

I was going to write a post about how I and my nefarious antifa terrorist friends have been lighting off fires in the Oregon forests, but, y'know what? Fuck that. It's been a shitty week, and I wanted to post something fun.

So...these are something called "anime music videos"; they're fan-made, and take clips from anime - that is, Japanese animated films, and set them to music. I stumbled across them reading Athena Scalzi's fun little post on the subject over at Whatever.

Here's the first one. The bulk of the anime is an utterly adorable little slice of life series called Tamako Market, たまこまーけっと , which is, well, adorable.

Couple of notes: the bit at the very end - which is definitely NOT from the rest of the anime, is from another show, Kyousougiga (京騒戯画)

And now I reeeelly want to find the episode of Tamako Market that's sampled at about 2:12 in the video, because I want to find out about the hammer and three nails. WTF? Crucifixion? In an adorable slice-of-life show? Seriously?

The music - which is a huge part of what makes it art - is a song titled "Crabbuckit" performed by the Good Lovelies. Big props to Tamako, the Good Lovelies, and to Copycat Revolver, who made it.

And the second is here:

This one is a lot more complex, and includes the following anime: Your Lie In April, Virgin Soul, Magi and the labyrinth of magic, Beyond the Boundary, Yuri On Ice, Death Parade, and Free!!!

I don't know why I like this one so much, but I think it's the combination of the utterly goofy pop song ("Dance Monkey", by Tones and I) and the clever editing by Light Raider, the creator. 

Anyway, that's for Friday. 

I'll be back this weekend with my take on these damn fires.

Friday Jukebox: Tangerine Toddler Jive Turkey Edition

What a fucking week this has been, eh?

So in honor of His Fraudulency's first week full of hysterical meltdowns and brutal, Obama-like executive-order tyranny, and general I'm-a-bigly-huge-assholishness, here's the Ohio Players with his new theme song.

Friday Jukebox: Carols for a Secular Sort of Saint Nicholas Day

Although the rest of the outfit got the day off I'm working today, so I have a computer to hand and, hence, you have this.

It is no secret that I am Hell-bound, and my "holiday music" tastes run to my unchurched bent. I enjoyed this simply because it's clever and melodic and still retains some vestigium of the "season".

Sadly, for me the season is colored by the grim anticipation of what is to come in the New Year; the ankommen an Macht of the Old Regime, the Return of the Oligarchs and their new dauphin, the Vulgar Aristocrat, the resurgence of the plutocratic, punitive Bourbons that I had thought were scourged for good from our politics in 1932.

And because this was a self-inflicted wound I cannot echo Ebenezer's nephew in his optimistic blessing of the holiday for what it symbolizes in human nature: (h/t to Pierce:)

"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

It seems to me more likely that this season belongs to a country, my country, that now belongs to a powerful minority that is trying to force it, and us, to shut its and our hearts to the least and lowest of our own, and I dread and fear what may happen if, and when, the sort of America that my grandparents knew, the America of the Gilded Age, the America that preceded the New Deal, is forced back upon us.

I am not by nature a happy man. That requires a belief in the justice of the world and the goodness of others and I have seen too much injustice to believe in the antithesis and I have little, if any, trust the goodness of humankind.

Still I try and look for happiness and hope. But more and more, on these, the longest nights of the year, I am drawn back to the old spare, sorrowful songs from the times we huddled against the cold and the dark unsure of whether the warmth and the light would ever return.

O sisters, too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day;
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
By-bye-lulee, lulay.

Herod the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day;
His men of might, in his own sight,
All children young, to slay.

Then woe is me, poor Child, for Thee,
And ever mourn and say;
For Thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By-bye-lulee, lulay.

Friday Jukebox: Obamamerica Hellscape Edition

A little piece of America back when it was still great. Well, sorta. So long as you were white. And straight. And male.

But, hey, who isn't, amirite?

Sorry. I just needed a little cool West Coast sound to chill me out after the ridiculous shit that went down in the Sportspalast along the Cuyahoga. Hope you have a swingin' weekend.

Friday Jukebox: Dirty Deeds Done Damn Spendy Edition

This is, apparently, a parody of some sort of Miley Cyrus song called "Party in the USA". I ran into the video at Frank Moraes' place and, like him, liked the goofy Cubist cartoon style. But, like him, I can see how this isn't exactly a purely-for-fun sort of thing.

"Party in the CIA" also bothers me

Frank says,

in that it is the kind of thing that people can take differently on the basis of their politics. I know that Yankovic is a liberal. But I also know a lot of authoritarians who would watch this video and come away with the idea that it would be totally great to be in the CIA and topple unfriendly governments. The truth is, in this song, Yankovic doesn't tip his hand. That's great for most subjects. Not for this.

Yep. Living as we are in the Age of Trump, where "terrorists" are people who kill people with cheap automatic weapons and homemade explosive belts but not people who kill people with silenced rifles or torture or air-launched cruise missiles...yeah. I can see the problem here.

Friday Jukebox II: Retro-retro Edition

Kind of awesome, kind of creepy...kind of...well, you make up your mind.

(h/t to Scalzi for this)

Friday Jukebox: That Fucking Wall Again Edition

Given that I have time on my hands and my laptop speakers finally working again I thought I put up a Friday Jukebox and this one grabbed me by the throat. I originally posted this tune almost two years ago.



But it just never seems to grow old, does it?

If Donald Trump had the actual gravitas and ironic self-knowledge that Greg Brown puts into his Hades in this tune you could almost hear him growling to his Trumpeters:

HADES
What do we have that they should want?
My children, my children
What do we have that they should want?

CERBERUS
What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon!
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
My children, my children
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That's why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free.

As I said back then; "...echoing the little trickle of tired, sullen anger that's always within me as my country slides unthinking into the New Gilded Age. I love the funky growl Brown gives his Devil, smoothly chortling his way to his appointment with Armageddon while he grins mercilessly at the fucking rubes and fools he's got doing his work for him."

Or, as the Mexicans might say; Chinga tu pared, gringo

Friday Jukebox: Je suis désolé Edition

Because, frankly, I am feeling desolate and far from home today.

But any day when Mark Knopfler can swing it zydeco fashion can't be entirely without hope.

Friday Jukebox: Far, far away edition

This is because I'm on my third day of two weeks covering a grading job in Medford, down in Oregon's Dixie. I'm fairly dirty and tired and bored of eating bad food and living out of a suitcase and it's only the third fucking day, ferchrissakes. I tried to think of something more uptempo and realized I just wanted something slow and kind of dreamy and sad.



Here come the priests, each one wailing and bemoaning
Lordy, they got their heads bowed down
Here come the madmen, they're too excited for atoning:
"Burn the mosque," they're shouting, "Burn it down!"

Hard to believe that Carly wrote that something like forty years ago. Damn.

It's been something of a difficult autumn for me. The Boy is ever more difficult, apparently because he has some variation of "attention-deficit disorder" which, apparently, also makes you kind of an asshole. The real irking part is that he's only an asshole to my Bride, who is the sweet, loving parent (as opposed to the irascible, impatient, demanding, um, well, me...) and who has busted her butt to try and make things easier for him. Well, he's burning that bridge like a torch in the night and driving his little sister - who is a really loving little soul - completely out of patience with him.

The real problem with this is that my presence - even if I'm not looming over him in a sort of Evil Stepdaddy sort of way - seems to turn the little bugger's Asshole down to background noise. It's when I leave for an extended time - as I have now - that Satan's Child comes roaring back out. It drives me nuts, because my Bride takes the hammer and there's nothing that I can do.

And just in case I didn't have anything to feel sorry for myself about, my right hip has decided that being a small, nagging sort of irritation isn't really fun, so it's gone flat-out, full-throttle, shove-the-shank-in-and-leave-it-and-cripple-the-sonofabitch. I can still walk, sort of, with a really awful torquing sort of motion that resembles nothing so much as Igor in the old Frankenstein flicks. But it hurts, hurts like a bastard. I don't even want to talk about putting a sock on my right foot; sometimes I've been that close to tears as the simple act of putting a tube of cloth on a piece of muscle and bome less than three feet away from my hand is just flat out frigging impossible.

I've come to dread these away-from-home trips just because I fear that I'm going to get up one morning and no amount of effort will let me put my sock on or tie my bootlace and I will have to go, barefoot, to some horrified stranger asking for help like a beggar in the marketplace.

My replacement date is now in March, because my current employer - for whom I worked for years back in the day has concluded that my "period of employment" dates only from my RE-hiring in February of this year. Which means I am ineligible for medical disability leave or paid benefits until after that date in 2016.

So I shamble around like some spastic zombie and curse my leg and my ill-fortune.

But enough self-pity, dammit.



I wanted to throw this up before I go, though; it's the full album from which I got the Karen Alexander song Brown Shoes I posted here a while back. If you're looking for something fun and uptempo, forward to 23:00 and the song Baghdad Ragman. You want hooky?

"Hussein the barber's got a razor like a saber, and
Hassan the butcher has a brother who's a baker, and
The whole bazaar it hums like a song, and
The Baghdad ragman comes with the dawn..."

Oh, yeah. I think you'll like it.

Tuesday Jukebox: Prisoners of Starvation Edition

From the Croatian Slovene group Laibach, whose work is either the most ingeniously subtle neogothic-neofascist neo-prog rock I've ever encountered or the most ingeniously subtle send-up of neogothic-neofascist neo-prog rock I've ever encountered (not so much this one but their cover of Opus' 1980s hit Life is Life).



As The Donald would say, youuuuuuuuuge extra credit for the Internationale. I loves me some Internationale.

Remember when I said a year or so back that I just had nothing more to say about the U.S. political process? That the entire maguffin was so thoroughly riddled with ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision, that the money had so thoroughly corrupted the whole shithouse, that the ginormous elephant-in-the-room-problem was that somewhere between a quarter and a third of U.S. citizens identified as Republicans and that the sorts of people who were still Republicans were clearly the sort of human dross that intelligent civilizations would find too credulous to be made into citizens, too stupid to be made into subjects, and too vicious to be made into slaves?

Well, that hasn't changed. I still have nothing worth saying that hasn't been said better elsewhere, and my opinion of the nation in general hasn't changed, either: We. Are. So. Fucked.

Fortunately for you Paul Bibeau still does, and he's tearing up the Trumpster. This post alone is worth the price of admission and the admission is free.

You really need to buy a copy of his book, too.

Oh, and those of you in need of more bloggage from this shebeen?

In about a month I am going to have my hip resocketed, borescoped, and pulled over. I will be completely bedridden for weeks and then housebound for months. So, be warned. Idle hands are a devil's playground, and I suspect that there is a devil in me, yet.

A youuuuuge devil, full of barbed spite and ire.

But we'll see.

Friday Jukebox: Saturday Night Edition - Panjabi Hit Squad

Just been sent this and these girls ROCK!!!!! #Bhangra#LIKE - Panjabi Hit SquadThanks to @kay__ray @ginusidhu and @h_dhaliwall for making a AWESOME video!

Posted by Panjabi Hit Squad on Saturday, June 20, 2015

Thanks, mike! These girls rock like they invented it!

Friday Jukebox: Stillin' the Water Edition

The Don Shirley Trio performing Waterboy, 1961:



This tune is supposed have made the Top 40 the year it was released, but I have no idea "which" chart this song is supposed to have been on. It's not the pop chart, or listed as one of the best selling singles of 1961 in any category. Whatever.

The really fascinating part of this tune - to me, anyway - is that the melody from this piece is very clearly the same tune that was released in the early Seventies as the "folk gospel" tune Put Your Hand in the Handand credited to someone named Gene McLellan...but so far as I know Shirley never got credit for the writing. Was this an adaptation of an older song, a spiritual, or an earlier gospel tune? Is that why it wasn't considered an original song?

I have no idea. But the abrupt string bass part that bookends the piece just emphasizes Shirley's gorgeous piano work. Just a little something for a rainy Friday.

Friday Jukebox: Goodbye Edition

This torchy grind works like a mechanical ass-kicker for me this cold, rainy Friday.

First, a guy that I've worked with for years is jumping to another firm. He's a good man, and a good friend, and one of the few people at the place I now work that doesn't seem to have a delight in playing silly reindeer games. I'll miss him.

And second don't get me started about the goddamn idiocy going on in the usual idiot places about "immigration".

If I had a nickel for every bone-stupid, prion-disease-moronic thing to come out of a Republican's mouth this week...shit, I'd OWN the Nickel Arcade.

"Goodnight was just a little word you learned.
Somewhere somebody that you burned
Was all too happy with a lie.
But love, you know you never got it right.
I don't know why you say goodnight;
You only mean to say goodbye."

Hope you've had a better week than I had...

Help a brotha' out?

For no real good reason I wanted cheering up today and I went to watch one of my favorite little videos: the Navy's VAW-116 "Sun Kings" take on the OutKast tune "Hey Ya" and, guess what..?

You can't see it anymore.

I get it; OutKast makes its money from music. The Sun Kings probably didn't bother to get the rights to use their music when they made the video. If OutKast lets anyone who wants to play it play it for free, well...pretty soon they can't make a living. I wish that wasn't true, but people are just greedy bastards and that's that.

But, geez, guys.

You couldn't make an exception for a bunch of funny squids? Give 'em permission to use it just for that video? It's goddamn funny and it makes great use of your music - I found you through them, guys!

C'mon. Help some silly sailors out, K?