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Paul Wesley

Certifiably Surly
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    2011
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Everything posted by Paul Wesley

  1. What do you have against 25-minute videos that could have been 3 minutes?
  2. Ignoring the clickbait headline (spoiler: nothing goes off the rails, much less OFF THE RAILS).
  3. Sly Stone, 82.
  4. Yeah, it's just weird to write an "I'm gonna kick his ass" song, and then hypertune your voice so you sound like Cher. That incongruence is one of the defining characteristics of Bro Country.
  5. I have a lot of fondness for this Nerf Herder tune:
  6. I rewatched the aggie game recently (what can I say... it's the offseason). It's crazy how they got most of the big-play breaks that night: Texas lost a fumble on the aggie 10, threw a pick-6 on a tipped ball on their 10, and got a punt blocked that the Aggies recovered at around the Texas 20. The Aggies got more than enough big breaks to pull off the home upset against a better team... EXCEPT that they were physically dominated pretty much every snap all night long. It was a 17-7 game that was nearly 34-0. Liucci watched the same game and says thing will "even out in short order?" "Farmer is better than Benson," "Reggie is better than Vince," "Things are going to even out in short order." No, no, and highly unlikely.
  7. Two things I knew: "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo" Solo on Weird Al's "Eat it." One thing I learned yesterday: Guitar on "Hang on Sloopy"
  8. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/may/19/jim-morrisons-long-lost-graveside-bust-turns-up-during-french-police-search
  9. Missouri is exactly two losses away from an odds-defying perfect conference season. And I am rooting for (against) them.
  10. Yeah, my experience was similar. I heard all the singles in real time because terrestrial radio was still a thing. Only after I bought the CD (years later) did I appreciate the front-to-back high-level songwriting.
  11. That has always been one of my favorites too. https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/topic/17296-share-your-music-it-probably-sucks-but-that’s-not-why-we-do-it/page/12/#findComment-5586480
  12. 20 years ago, my then-girlfriend was a postpartum nurse. She came home from the hospital one day and announced, "In six years these babies will be showing up for kindergarten, every single boy will be named Hayden, Brayden, Aidan, and Cayden." They're in college now.
  13. I don't think there's anything wrong with that clip of Earley talking about the ejection. He's obviously frustrated, and he's calling out his own player ("I've never seen someone fly out and then go talk to the other team's dugout"), and he's entirely correct. Maybe I'm misreading it.
  14. The Jumbotron effect.
  15. Her reward: https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/23/weather/trump-denied-disaster-aid-arkansas-tornadoes/index.html
  16. I think it's hard to overstate how much the existence of cryptocurrency has raised the payoffs for venal politicians. In Trump 1.0, we got all worked up about people staying in Trump hotels in order to win favor. But those transactions were teeny little sums of money, and they were at least somewhat traceable and discoverable. We're a couple orders of magnitude beyond that in 2.0. We're looking at many, many millions of dollars that cannot be accounted for in any way... even if law enforcement had the willpower and/or courage to try. Having gold bars in your closet is horse-and-buggy treason by comparison.
  17. I live in a world where everyone around me thinks "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" is genius. Since I just didn't see it, I thought the failure must be my own. Today I decided it's just a bad song. *Excerpted from my upcoming collection of essays, "All of My Issues Are Someone Else's Fault." Pre-order on Amazon.
  18. Just caught the last five minutes of this press conference. The flat-out lies ("we have virtually no inflation anymore," "groceries are cheap again," etc.) - it's comical.... as bad as any Soviet or North Korean level of dishonesty. I remember the first week of his 2017 term, and how the media spent a week refuting his "biggest inauguration crowd ever." It was a huge amount of media coverage for a lie that was pretty inconsequential. Today he vomits out a whole series of bullshit economic "data," and the news media just moves right along instead of immediately saying "none of that is true." Apparently the lies won. I don't know how else to make sense of it.
  19. Ha ha - I appreciate that you put "music producer" in sarcasm quotes. I agree with you and with jimmyjazz: Apparently the bar for giving yourself that title is super fucking low. Like, buy some prosumer speakers and hang an acoustic guitar in the background of your web stream. To start off with "I don't even know what genre this is" when discussing one of the top-5 selling records in history... wow. Most actual music producers would have to go several hundred deep into the all-time best-seller list before they'd admit that they couldn't even assign the artist to a genre/genres. That guy made it to number four (and I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he's ever heard of Michael Jackson or AC/DC... which definitely may not be true).
  20. That's probably a great choice for a beginner guitar.
  21. I just tell people I've been here long enough that I get to bitch about how bad traffic has gotten.
  22. Yeah, I think this is the biggest part of the answer. The goal of getting signed to a label used to be (by far) the major hurdle for any artist. If you got signed, it gave you credibility. Once you were signed, the industry machine will make sure your record gets reviewed in print and online. The label will (in part) help arrange and advertise your tour. As an artist, you've at least got *some* kind of shot at being heard and rising above the noise. I'm not sure how much any of that is true these days... and I don't think there's anyone who REALLY knows what the model is. You definitely don't need a label to get your music onto the streaming platforms. And maybe those thousands of dollars the band was going to spend to come to Austin could be spent making a creative video, paying influencers to promote on TikTok, putting on an "outsider" sort of show/tour for yourself, etc. So now, why would an artist fly to Austin? And if the most promising bands with buzz and momentum aren't coming, then why would a music fan pay HUGE sums of money for a ticket? The whole thing unravels pretty quickly.
  23. It's been a few years since I bought a guitar (I know, I know), but I just broke that streak with a 12-string that will get here next week. I've always thought 12-strings were amazing. When I was 12 or 13, one of the old kids at church ("old" = 16 or 17) brought one, and when I heard him play it, I remember thinking, "Why would anyone play a 6-string when you could play this?" My very first guitar - a few months later - was a cheap 12-string Alvarez... which in hindsight was an extremely hard-to-play guitar, and a terrible choice for a first guitar. I still feel like - in a way that's not at all true for 6-strings - there's a spectrum between "plays well" (the Taylor 655 that I owned for a decade and sold) and "sounds glorious" (the Martin DM 12 that I still own and keep strung as a Nashville high-string guitar). Anyway, Taylor started making a 12-fret 12-string. Allegedly the shorter scale addresses a couple of those problems. Smaller body and shorter scale = not so gigantic and unwieldy. Also, shorter scale = slightly less string tension, so (theoretically) a lot easier to play barre chords. We'll see.
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