How horrible is this song? Well, let's look at where it is loved. It was chosen as the song of the century by viewers of a popular German TV network. SONG OF THE CENTURY!!! Those people love them some scat. It is Germany's all-time best selling single. And if there's one thing that history has taught us, it's that 6 million Germans can't be wrong! Just for good measure, it also appears in an off-Broadway production called Power Balladz. Need I say more?
These guys have shown us all that hurricanes rock, but less forceful winds just... suck. I'll take a hurricane any day. Just like I'd take back the Cold War and the Berlin Wall if I could just forget that this musical nightmare ever happened.
There are no barriers here. Let's unite in HATE. I'll tear down that wall below, rush on through and mingle. You've waited long enough. It's open.
In all honesty I believe that if they just added a banjo picker to this it would make a right smart little ditty.
ReplyDeleteLess "Rock You Like A Hurricane;" more "Sog The Cardboard You Left Outside Like A Light-Wintry-Mix."
ReplyDeleteI remember hearing this at age 9 or 10-- an age at which I bought a fucking Wilson Phillips tape-- and thinking, "MAN, this is cheesy."
When you were about to toss the cassette, did you think "maybe I should hold on to this for one more day"?
Delete/Tips floppy black "Blossom" hat
DeleteThis is Klaus Herfernerffer and you are listening to Z-107 the ROCK of the Eastern Bloc. Who wants wake up some Stasi guys? You do? WELL, TURN IT UP - IT'S THE SCORPIONS!
ReplyDelete*ahem* Excuse me, Klaus. I believe you mean EHHTS DAAAAHS SCORPIAAAAAAHHHHNNNZZZ!!!
Delete+1 to all of you (above). Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteEeh, I don't know Marv. It is a horrible song, to be sure, but it's a song about the fall of Communism, and living behind the Iron Curtain is not something dipshit american balog commenters are even 5% qualified to relate to; this is probably the driving force behind its popularity. Call it the Jesus Jones Corollary.
ReplyDeletePlus, this is far down the list of agregious crimes perpetuated against music by 80's metal bands playing power balads.
I'm not even sure that the devil wants you as an advocate on this one.
DeleteF U man. I like a couple of those. And you have TWO misspellings there, Mr. HTML.
Delete/humph!
Is this the worst whistling break/intro/outro in the history of pop music?
ReplyDeleteIf not, what is? "Moves Like Jagger?" "Centerfold?" "Walk Like An Egyptian" (or was that one actually cheesily brilliant)?
This is the worst. Hard to HATE the Bangles. Susanna, anyway.
DeleteI get that Deadspin commenting is so dead it's not even fun to poke its corpse anymore, but if you'll excuse yet another complaint, I'd like to lodge one.
ReplyDeleteFor all the talk of the awful two-column view, burner accounts, and lack of Ninjas, nobody ever talks about how physically broken the system is. It's kind of hilarious, really, that it's not even worth mentioning that you simply must click the reload button at least twice in order for it to work properly, or that viewing a reply chain and then attempting to make your own comment will pin the reply uselessly below the comment field as you type.
It's sort of a feat of engineering, if you think about it, to make a system so hopelessly awful that no one is even miffed that its user-friendliness is on par with a hungry bear.
Haha I forgot that when you decide to click on a comment's replies and then go back to the other comments, it strands you back up at the top of the "discussion system" all over again. God that's so intuitive I can't believe it took 40 Hungarians to come up with it.
DeleteIt fucking sucks. There is nothing good about the current layout. You're absolutely right that the invasion of the sporttalkradio dipshits has taken the focus off the sheer clumsiness of it. The whole thing is like a bad joke, or a case study from a MBA class on bad IT management.
DeleteBut hey, one time we got Malcom Gladwell to pop and and pop off in the comments that time, and that never would have happened if it wasn't a 2 column clickatorium.
Yes, and not to beat a dead horse, but the reload button for live chats has been broken for I don't know how long.
DeleteIt just couldn't suck any harder. It was designed by Floyd in True Romance.
DeleteGuys, I'm at BWB5 and just in case anybody cares, a giant room filled with bloggers smells like stale tears and cats. Gross. Just waiting to ambush Barry Petchesky and rub his neck tat.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the report, cobs. I'm at BBW5 and just in case anybody cares, this giant room is really cramped.
DeleteGood information, guys. I'm at BoB5, where we just had lunch. The wraps are clunky and terrible, like they were put together by someone who just started wrapping.
DeleteI'm at BeWB5 and I'm just so excited to finally see some.
DeleteI'm on DWD5 and . . . holy crap I'm a huge nerd.
DeleteI plan on curling up with some travel magazines today. I'm really looking forward to it.
ReplyDeleteMy life took an unexpected turn.
DeleteHey, Gloomy Gus! Don't you have snowshoes? What about a snowbike? Is that more your speed? Cross-country skiing is like sliding across the heavens. So many things to enjoy now that the oppressive summer heat is behind us. Speaking of which, I have to check on my roasted root vegetable st... [THWACK]
DeleteSo.. just read the Wilbon piece on DS and made the unfortunate mistake of clicking the link to Wilbon’s Sean Taylor piece. It kind of irks me when black athletes get blamed for not leaving their neighborhood, friends and family as soon as they make some money in order to escape potential violence. The rationale is always, oh you have money now, you don’t need to live so close to your friends and family anymore, YOU MADE IT! I was fortunate enough to not grow up in a violent and impoverished neighborhood, but I know that hitting the lotto wouldn’t all of a sudden make me uproot myself to live amongst the super-rich. I am not saying that Sean Taylor couldn’t have taken some extra precaution on the environment he surrounded himself with, I just hate that people like Wilbon, who probably never lived a day in that type of neighborhood, think that it’s so easy to just leave everything you know behind. It is beyond him to think that maybe a person doesn’t want to all of a sudden shut everyone out and move into a neighborhood and make new friends with people who he probably shares nothing in common with other than wealth. Not to mention most millionaires are unbearable and probably aren’t so welcoming to a young black athlete who moves next-door.
ReplyDeleteOh and this song ROCKS!
So, nobody else is going to ask Marv what the deal is with his new avatar? Fine. I'll do it.
ReplyDelete------------------------------------
Marv,
What's the deal with your new avatar?
Updated my profile!
DeleteI just wanted to show off my new tats. Or my Photoshop skills. Or both. Or neither. It might be a real pic. Or at least part of it. Or none of it. But probably some of it is somewhat real, albeit not necessarily "real" in terms of an accurate depiction of me. But it might be. Although it could be altered in some way. Or not.
You hacked IMG's phone again. Didn't you?
DeleteMaybe. Or not. I might have. Or nothing of the sort may ever have occurred. I can definitively say that one of those things are true. At least partially.
DeleteI can vouch for the fact that it is a real photo, and that despite what the writing may lead you to believe, it was not taken in a mirror.
DeleteThis song makes me want to root for Communism. Without the fall of the Berlin Fucking Wall, we never would have been subjected to it's heavy airplay.
ReplyDeleteGot a chuckle out of this.
ReplyDeletehttp://imgur.com/a/9H0Hv
That's really funny.
DeleteThere's nothing out there for me.
ReplyDeleteI feel ya, man. It's been so long since I've felt any passion about anything, I might just give up.
DeleteWARNING: THIS IS VERY LONG AND ANNOYING. YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T READ IT.
ReplyDeleteHello, friends. Allow me to babble and complain for a moment.
I'm gonna start a little ways back. About 18 months ago, Gawker unveiled its redesign. It was horrendous. Everyone complained and three people actually died. There was a scrolling bar on the right side of the screen. Tapping the arrow keys caused you to suddenly switch which story you were viewing. And worst of all, a new default view was put in place, called "Traditional View."
Traditional View decided which story was the most important and made it appear at the top of the page. Underneath the top story, were two smaller side-by-side stories that were, apparently, tied for second most important. And underneath those two stories, were four more, even smaller, stories, that came in a four-way tie for fourth most important stories. Even further down the page was a huge mess of links to other Deadspin stories and some other Gawker sites, as well.
It made perfect sense.
Unfortunately, SOME people didn't like Traditional View. Those people whined like stupid idiot babies until Gawker/Deadspin was forced to add an option to view the site in "Blog View." Blog View showed the stories in chronological order, the way it had always been done on the site. This made perfect sense to people with clocks and those who employed a "left to right, top to bottom" style of reading things.
So the problem was solved and everyone was happy and there were no more problems.
Except there was a problem. It was true that when a user switched to "Blog View," the page would reload in the desired view, as advertised. The user could then click on whatever story he or she (not she) wished and see some athlete's dick or something. But when they returned back to the Deadspin homepage, lo and behold, Traditional View had returned.
It seemed that the only way to see the Blog View would be to manually switch to it, each and every time one visited the home page. This is perfectly convenient for a normal person with endless amounts of time, patience, and no fear of ever developing arthritis, but for a small segment of the population, this seemed to be a bit of a frustration.
Luckily, because Gawker has a login system that recognizes individual users, they built in functionality that enables each user to select his or her default view.
Just kidding. They didn't do that.
The solution was a script called "Gawker Always Blog View." If a reader was truly dedicated, and angry enough, he or she might have been able to find this tidy piece of code buried somewhere in the vast internet. By installing an add-on script builder called "Greasemonkey" to his or her browser, the user could install the "Gawker Always Blog View" script. This script would automatically detect when a user had visited any Gawker site and automatically add "blog." to the beginning of the URL, so that the page would load in blog view. BRILLIANT!
But wait, wait, wait... isn't this just some stupid sports site where people go to make dick jokes?
Yes. And believe it or not, this story gets much more complicated.
After the redesign, Deadspin's site had been such that you could just add "blog." before "deadspin.com" and you'd get the same page in blog view. So, for any given story, if the URL was "deadspin.com/5484839/jahvid_best_dick_closeup", you could type in "blog.deadspin.com/5484839/jahvid_best_dick_closeup" and get the same thing in Blog View. This is exactly what Gawker Always Blog View did automatically. BUT somewhere along the line, Deadspin changed their site so that there is only ONE view when one navigates away from the homepage. If a visitor is viewing a story, and tries to type in "blog." at the beginning of the URL, the page will automatically reload without the "blog." because that view doesn't exist.
...continued...
The issue is that because of this minor change, the Gawker Always Blog View script became defunct. This is a technical description of the problem:
DeleteUSER: Go to Deadspin.com
BROWSER: Yessir!
SCRIPT: Hey! I recognize that site, let me put it Blog View for you. I know you fuckin' LOVE Blog View.
DEADSPIN: Here you go dude: all of today's stories in chronological order, just like you like 'em.
USER: Sweet! Hmmm... what's this? A story about Jahvid Best's cock! Better see what this is all about.
BROWSER: On my way, bro.
SCRIPT: Ah, Deadspin, still... Blog View coming right up!
DEADSPIN: You know what, Blog View doesn't actually exist for stories anymore, I'm gonna just put you back into Traditional View.
SCRIPT: Traditional View? That's not right. Blog View. Just like the USER wanted.
DEADSPIN: Blog View? I don't have that page in a Blog View, but I can give you Traditional View.
SCRIPT: Oh, hey, Traditional View, I know what I'm supposta do with THAT!
*page reloads over and over and over*
What IS a user to do? Surely, no sane person would take it upon themselves to learn how to edit scripts JUST to be able to see his favo... yeah, I learned how to edit scripts. And it fuckin' worked, too.
With some sort of ninja edit to the GABV script, I was able to make it so that it would automatically switch the home page to Blog View, but leave the rest of the site alone.
And now my world has come crashing down. Yesterday, as my browser was firing up, I noticed that it was doing an auto-update to Greasemonkey. For some reason, even though there haven't been any updates to the GABV script since it was created on 5/13/11, it re-wrote the script as it was originally written... destroying the fixes I'd made.
I'm drawing a fine line with a shaky hand here, but just because I'm willing to go through a seemingly psychotic amount of tedium in order to view a website in the way I like, does NOT mean that I'm willing to do it again.
I'd gotten so used to the GABV script doing its job that I forgot that Traditional View existed. Now that I've been shit back out into the cold, smelly gutter of Gawker Avenue, I'm reminded that all of my recent frustrations with the site haven't even taken into account that I've got the Deadspin home page propped up on some fucking phone books just so I can see its head at the breakfast table (I have no idea what that means).
I'm having a hard time imagining how Deadspin could've provided a worse user experience. It's fucking insane. The fact that I still visit the site worries me, because I've never been shit on in real life, but how am I going to react if that actually occurs? I'm starting to think that my reaction will be to show up at their house on occasion to drop off an envelope full of dick jokes and a few advertising dollars. What the hell is wrong with me?
Also, Kinja.
Too long; I read every word.
DeleteFor what it's worth, I've long been in the habit of simply clicking on the DS in my bookmarks bar (which sends me to blog.deadspin) when I want to return to the homepage. So I haven't seen traditional view in a long time, and I don't have this Monkeywrench thing you're talking about.
Also, +1.
That's so great. +1
DeleteJesus Theo, you are a man after my own heart. This was beautiful, and smart, and angry, and funny. +1
DeleteI actually much prefer the "Traditional" view. If I'm away from the site for more than a couple of hours, I like being able to get a snapshot of what the major stories are. And the list is still over there on the right if I want to see the chronology.
DeleteHi Sean!
DeletePeople use something other than Blog View? This "if I'm away for a couple of hours" is retarded. It's so time consuming to scroll through four posts if you're away for a couple hours? Then again, for some people a couple of hours is lunch at an all you can eat buffet, so I guess the food hangover after eating 9 pounds of food could lead to a time period of incoherence, so maybe I'm way off.
DeleteOh, man. I seriously had no idea that anybody used blog view anymore. That sucks that they changed it up though because if that's what you guys prefer, there is no reason for them to tamper with it.
DeleteOne question though: The right column in traditional view sorts the posts in chronological order, and lets you flip through the posts in chronological order without having to click "back" after each one if that's how you want to read them. I never look at the featured article on the home page, but immediately fixate on the right hand column and read Deadspin that way. Doesn't this work just as well?
I do sympathize with the time you put into the coding though. After the 4-star ranking system was exposed, I spent an embarrassingly long time coming through the source codes of my profile as well as several others trying to identify any minuscule differences and determine what my ranking was before realizing that this probably isn't going to be found there and giving up. I know nothing about coding.
Also, this finally explains how Raysism was able to avoid auto-clearing the reply count next to his name. I've always wondered that, but was afraid to ask.
I just...I just want to hug you. And cry. This was like watching the Bicycle Thief for the first time. "Papa! Papa!"
ReplyDeletefleghj
ReplyDelete