Weezer – "Pork and Beans" (2008)

I’ma do the things that I wanna do

I ain’t got a thing to prove to you

No dish is easier to prepare and more satisfying to consume than beans and franks.

Simply dump a 15-ounce can of Van Camp’s pork and beans into a saucepan and add a couple of Oscar Mayer beef hot dogs that have been cut into bite-sized pieces.  Then heat and serve:

That’s all there is to it.  (Sure, you could add ketchup, or garlic salt, or whatever – but why gild the lily?)

Of course, if you’re really lazy you can just buy this premixed concoction and stick it in the microwave:

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I planned a recent bike ride so that it included a stop at the legendary Weenie Beenie [sic] restaurant in Arlington, Virginia.  

I ordered the usual – a hot dog with chili, salt-and-vinegar-flavored potato chips, and a Dr. Pepper – and repaired to the bus stop across the street to eat.  (Weenie Beenie, which opened in 1954, is strictly a carryout operation.)

The homemade chili on my hot dog was tasty, but it came sans beans.  As far as I could tell, there are plenty of weenies at Weenie Beenie, but there’s nary a bean to be found there.

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I don’t know if Weenie Beenie has ever been accused of false advertising given the fact that its dishes are entirely lacking in bean content.

As a lawyer who spent much of my time defending advertisers who were accused on making false or deceptive claims for their products, I know exactly what arguments I would make on behalf of the owners of Weenie Beenie if they were to retain my professional services.

“The name of my client’s restaurant is ‘Weenie Beenie,’ not ‘Weenie Beanie,’” I would point out.  “Is it not reasonable to assume that consumers know how to correctly spell a simple word like ‘bean’?”

Case dismissed!

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Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo wrote “Pork and Beans” after the band was summoned to meet with executives at their record company and told that they needed to record more commercial material.

“I came out of [that meeting] pretty angry,” Cuomo told a Rolling Stone reporter. “But ironically, it inspired me to write another song.”

What’s ironic is that “Pork and Beans” – written as a defiant response to soulless record company suits – ended up becoming Weezer’s biggest single.  It reached number one on the Billboard “Hot Modern Rock Tracks” chart in May 2008, and held on to that top spot for eleven weeks – only the third single to retain the #1 ranking for that long.

Click here to listen to “Pork and Beans.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

White Stripes – "The Hardest Button to Button" (2003)

I had opinions that didn’t matter

I had a brain that felt like pancake batter

Last month, I wrote about David Trone, the billionaire who set a record ten years ago for the most money ever spent in an unsuccessful primary election campaign for Congress.  This year, Trone shattered his previous record by spending almost twice as much in another losing effort to win his party’s nomination for a Congressional seat.

The line I used on social media as a tease for that post was “When will he ever learn?” – which some of you will recognize as a paraphrase of the refrain to the famous anti-war song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Perhaps that tease should have read “When will 2 or 3 lines learn?”  Because every time I write about politics, I end up wishing that I hadn’t.

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I didn’t write about Trone’s expensive defeats with politics in mind.  I didn’t discuss his political views in my post – they were irrelevant.  (Trone is a Democrat, but I would have written exactly the same piece had he been a Republican.)   

Big spender David Trone

I wrote about him because I suspect that a lot of politicians run for office primarily to satisfy their oversized egos – not only do they think they know better than you and I, but they also love the attention and the perks and the ass-kissing that elected officials get.  

I admit that I took some satisfaction from the fact that a filthy rich guy like Trone had spent a gazillion dollars running for Congress and failed.  And I figured that some of my readers might have the same reaction.  

The post was something of a cheap shot.  If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I was motivated to some degree by envy.  (Do I wish I was a billionaire like Trone?  YOU BET YOUR SWEET ASS I DO!)  But it wasn’t like I was picking on someone who wasn’t my own size – Trone couldn’t care less about what 2 or 3 lines has to say about him.)

After I was finished talking about Trone, I went on to present the rather staggering numbers for total campaign spending in recent elections.  I found those numbers of interest because I’m old enough to remember when it was taken for granted that Republicans would outspend Democrats.  But it’s the Democrats who have the edge in campaign money – and it’s been that way for some time now. 

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Not writing about politics on 2 or 3 lines doesn’t mean I don’t care about politics.  I spend a fair amount of time reading and thinking about political issues, and I enjoy discussing politics with others – even if they don’t agree with my opinions.  

Talking politics with someone who agrees with all of your beliefs isn’t very satisfying – it’s nice to have someone tell you that you’re right and that anyone who disagrees with you is wrong, but you don’t learn anything from such a discussion.  

But you very well may learn something from a friendly debate with someone who doesn’t share your opinions.  At the least, the give-and-take of such an exchange forces you to articulate and defend those beliefs.  (Maybe you walk away from that discussion even more convinced that you are right – but maybe you realize that there are some holes in your arguments, and you adjust your views accordingly.)

Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to have a friendly debate any more.  People no longer are able to agree to disagree on political issues.  When you have a different point of view from other people, they demonize you.  

If you and I have different opinions about a movie, or we like different kinds of music, we can still be friends – but if we voted for different Presidential candidates, your reaction is more likely to be “He’s an evil piece of sh*t!”

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It would be easy to attribute this sorry state of affairs to Donald Trump’s rise to prominence as a national political figure a decade ago.  People either love him or they hate him – very few are neutral on the man – and you can’t attribute the diametrically opposed feelings of the lovers and the haters to differences of opinion over whether we should raise taxes on the wealthy, or whether enforcement of our immigration laws should be more stringent, or what bathrooms transgender people should use. 

You might be familiar with the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” which is used pejoratively by President Trump and his supporters to dismiss his opponents as irrational and unhinged.  But you may not know that the use of that pseudo-psychiatric phrase to describe those who have a visceral revulsion to a political figure predates Trump.  

The late Charles Krauthammer was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist.  In 2003, he coined the phrase “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to explain what he viewed as the hysterically negative reaction of some people to George W. Bush’s presidency – a reaction that transcended legitimate policy disagreements and spilled over into something that was pathological.  

Conservative David Horowitz later applied the term to Bush’s successor.  “Obama Derangement Syndrome” was the term he applied to what he viewed as the over-the-top comparisons of Obama to Stalin, David Koresh, Charles Manson, and Saddam Hussein.  He urged his fellow conservatives not to duplicate the “manias” of those on the left with regard to Bush.  “[Obama] is not exactly the anti-Christ,” Horowitz wrote, “although a disturbing number of people on the right are convinced he is.”

There are a lot of people who have “Hillary Clinton Derangement Syndrome” or “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Derangement Syndrome” as well.  God knows that there plenty of good reasons to take the position that neither one of them should be President, but it sure would be nice if the people who felt that way didn’t go postal every time their names came up.

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Given how many people have lost their cotton-pickin’ minds when it comes to politics, I shouldn’t have been surprised to receive some pretty unhinged comments on my Trone post.

One commenter somehow read my post as being pro-Trump.  God only knows where he got that interpretation from, but it certainly wasn’t from anything that I wrote.  (Perhaps he suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome”?)

Another commenter couldn’t handle the truth about campaign expenditures.  Sorry, folks – but the facts are the facts.  (My numbers came from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan organization that aggregates and processes raw data directly from official government data and is widely considered to be a highly reliable source for tracking money in U.S. politics.)

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“The Hardest Button to Button” was released in 2003 on Elephant, the White Stripes’ fourth studio album.

The amazing music video for the song was directed by Michel Gondry, who is best known as the director of the 2004 movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Click here to watch it.

That music video was brilliantly parodied in a 2006 episode of The Simpsons.  Click here to watch that parody.

Click here to buy “The Hardest Button to Button” from Amazon.  

Bloodhound Gang – "The Bad Touch" (2000)

I want you smothered

Want you covered

Like my Waffle House hash browns

As you know if you read the most recent 2 or 3 lines, I dreamed last week that we had a question about songs with the word “dog” in their titles at our last trivia contest.  That post listed ten dog songs (including “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges), ten songs with “cat” in their titles (like “What’s New Pussycat” by Tom Jones and “Honky Cat” by Elton John), and ten songs whose titles mentioned animals other than dogs or cats (including “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane and “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd).

Today, I’m going to give you my list of the best 25 recording artists with an animal in their name.  Here goes:

  1. Adam Ant

  2. Animals

  3. Beastie Boys

  4. Bloodhound Gang

The Bloodhound Gang

  5. Blue Öyster Cult

  6. Buffalo Springfield

  7. Byrds

  8. Country Joe and the Fish

  9. Crazy Horse

10. Danger Mouse

11. Eagles

12. Eagles of Death Metal

13. Echo & the Bunnymen

14. Great White

15. Iron Butterfly

16. Modest Mouse

17. Monkees

18. Snoop Dogg

19. Steppenwolf

20. T Rex

21. Three Dog Night

22. Toad the Wet Sprocket

23. Toadies

24. Turtles

25. Yardbirds

(You can use the comment form to the right if you think I left out anyone who deserves to be on that list . . . but I didn’t.)

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I can’t resist the opportunity to feature the Bloodhound Gang’s “The Bad Touch” whenever I can.  Like this guy, I can’t believe the lyrics:

Click here to watch the official music video for “The Bad Touch.”  (It’s been viewed over HALF A BILLION times on YouTube.)

Click here to buy “The Bad Touch” from Amazon.

Fugazi – "Bulldog Front" (1988)

It’s all attention to armor

To the armor you wear so well

My weekly trivia contests always include one or more questions about pop music.

There’s always a three-part question where the host plays brief snippets from three records that have something in common, and asks players to identify either the titles of the songs or the artists performing the songs.  (For example, last week the host played three excerpts from covers of Prince songs, and asked us to identify the three recording artists doing those covers.  The week before that, we were asked to come up with the titles of these three songs, all of which referenced major-league baseball teams: “Royals” by Lorde, “Red Red Wine” by UB40, and “She Talks to Angels” by the Black Crowes.)

There are often other questions related to popular recording artists as well.  On occasion, the ten-point “bonus” sheet asks us to match ten song or album titles to the artists who recorded them, or the years when they were released.

One reason a successful trivia team almost always has a mixture of younger and older players is that very few people who know sixties music also know nineties music, or aughts music.  

I’m old, and I’m great on the records that came out when I was in high school and college, but I don’t know squat about the newer stuff – that’s why I like to have at least one thirtysomething or fortysomething teammate.

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A few nights ago, I had a dream about getting a trivia question about songs with “dog” in the title.

After waking up, I lay in bed and tried to think of songs that fit that description.  Here are ten that I came up with off the top of my head:

“Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley (1956)

“Walking the Dog” by Rufus Thomas (1963)

“I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges (1969)

“Hey Bulldog” by the Beatles (1969)

“Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin (1971)

“Me and You and a Dog Named Boo” by Lobo (1971)

“Diamond Dogs” by David Bowie (1974)

“Hair of the Dog” by Nazareth (1975)

“Bulldog Front” by Fugazi (1988)

“Who Let the Dogs Out” by the Baha Men (2000)

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There are a fair number of records with “cat” in their title as well.  Here are ten of them:

“What’s New, Pussycat?” By Tom Jones (1965)

“Nashville Cats” by the Lovin’ Spoonful (1966)

“Stray Cat Blues” by the Rolling Stones (1968)

“China Cat Sunflower” by the Grateful Dead (1969)

“Honky Cat” by Elton John (1972)

“Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin (1974)

“The Year of the Cat” by Al Stewart (1976) 

“Cat Scratch Fever” by Ted Nugent (1977)

“Cool for Cats” by Squeeze (1979)

“Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” by David Bowie (1983)

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Of course, there are some very well-known records whose titles reference animals other than dogs or cats.  Here are ten examples:

“White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane (1967)

“I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles (1967)

“Monkey Man” by the Rolling Stones (1969)

“War Pigs” by Black Sabbath (1970)

“A Horse with No Name” by America (1971)

“Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd (1973)

“Rock Lobster” by the B-52s (1978)

“Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor (1982)

“Hungry Like the Wolf’ by Duran Duran (1982)

“When Doves Cry” by Prince (1984)

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Each of those three lists has some truly great records.  But I think the records on the third list are probably stronger on average than the records on either of the first two.

If I had to choose between the records on the dog list and the records on the cat list, I think I’d go with the dog records.  (There are some truly awful records on the cat list.)

I’ll send all three lists to the company that puts on the trivia games my team plays in and tell them they’re free to use them to construct future questions – no charge!

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I’m embarrassed by the fact that 2 or 3 lines has never featured a Fugazi record until now.

I lived in Washington, DC during the heyday of that city’s “harDCore” punk scene.  But I never saw Fugazi – or Minor Threat or the Bad Brains or Tru Fax and the Insaniacs or any of the other great local bands of that era – perform live.  

Why didn’t I ever go to one of their shows?  Because – to quote the immortal Red Forman – I was a dumbass!

I could have gone to this Fugazi
show if I wasn’t such a dumbass

Fugazi was immensely influential on punk and alternative music in the eighties and nineties.  Nirvana admired them and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam said that seeing the band live “was a life-changing experience.”  They were a favorite of Joey Ramone of the Ramones and Joe Strummer of the Clash – Strummer told Rolling Stone in 2000 that Fugazi was the band that best exemplified “the spirit of punk.”   Jack White and individual members of groups as musically diverse as Arcade Fire, Blink-182, Blur, Bon Iver, the Drive-By Truckers, Linkin Park, Modest Mouse, Paramore, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tool – to name just a few – have also cited Fugazi as an influence. 

Click here to listen to “Bulldog Front,” which was released in 1988 on Fugazi’s eponymous debut EP.  (It was re-released the following year on the band’s first full-length album, 13 Songs.)

Click here to buy “Bulldog Front” from Amazon.