Inner Circle – "Bad Boys" (1987)

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

I feel like I’ve been reading the late David Foster Wallace’s postmodern encyclopedic novel, Infinite Jest (which was published almost exactly 25 years ago) for years.  But I’ve actually only read about one quarter of the book’s 1079 pages and 388 footnotes.

Wallace’s book has been described as “a masterpiece” and “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit.”

But not everyone is a fan.  One reviewer called Infinite Jest “terrible” – also, “bloated, boring, gratuitous, and – perhaps especially – uncontrolled.”

Another critic said that Wallace’s writing was “impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating.”  He concluded that the author (who committed suicide at age 46) “seem[ed] motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off.”

I suspect that Infinite Jest – similar to other 20th-century magna opera like Finnegan’s Wake and Gravity’s Rainbow – is so full of sh*t that its eyes are brown.  (Can you say, “The emperor has no clothes!”)

But I’m doing my best to get through it – I’m giving it the old college try.    

We’ll see if I’m successful or not.  Parts of Infinite Jest have been very readable, but other part have been a real slog. 

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In Infinite Jest, the calendar years are given names, not numbers.

The naming rights for each year are auctioned off to the highest-bidding corporate sponsor.  Most of the book’s action takes place during the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.”  Other sponsored years include the “Year of the Whopper” and the “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad.”

As far as 2 or 3 lines goes, I’m tempted to name 2021 the “Year of the Eastern Shore Undercover Facebook Page” in honor of the social media-based news source for the good citizens of Wicomico and Worcester Counties, Maryland – which are located on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, smack dab between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean – because Eastern Shore Underground (“ESU” for short) has provided me with enough material to last the entire year.

Click here to visit ESU’s website, which has links you can use to follow Eastern Shore Undercover on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram.

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The first ESU-inspired 2 or 3 lines post featured an ESU item concerning a female who was circumambulating the parking lot of an Irish bar in the nude one frigid Saturday evening  The second one was about a male who was described as “not in his right state of mind” because he was gallivanting around outside of a Days Inn hotel while en déshabillé – that is, nekkid as a jaybird.

Today’s 2 or 3 lines essentially regurgitates a bunch of miscellaneous Eastern Shore Undercover posts from the last two weeks.  As you’ll see, the citizen complaints to law enforcement that are the bread and butter of the ESU Facebook page run the gamut of low crimes and misdemeanors.

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The lower Eastern Shore of Maryland seems to be a pretty dangerous place.  E.g.:

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Drug use and panhandling seem to be major problems in the area:

(I love it that the suspect is described as a “frequent flyer” with the police department.)

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Many of the items that ESU shares with its subscribers are sui generis.  To wit:

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Here are a couple of bathroom-related items:

As you can imagine, that last item generated a LOT of comments:

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Did the police really needed to be called about the following two incidents? 

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And last but not least:

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“Bad Boys” was a top ten single for Inner Circle, a Jamaican reggae band, in 1987.

But the song is best known as the theme for Cops, a reality TV show that premiered in 1989 and ran on the Fox television network for 25 years.  (After Fox dropped the show, it ran on the Spike cable network for several more years.)

Click here to listen to “Bad Boys.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon:

Bettye Lavette – "Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)" (2018)

Don’t want to judge nobody

Don’t want to be judged

For a lazy blog author like yours truly, the Eastern Shore Undercover Facebook page is the gift that keeps on giving.

Eastern Shore Undercover – which I’ll abbreviate as “ESU” – is a social media-based news source that reports on the goings-on of the police departments and sheriff’s offices of the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland – Wicomico and Worcester Counties, to be precise.

Click here to visit ESU’s website, which has links you can use to follow Eastern Shore Undercover on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram.

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Matthew 7:1 – which reads “Judge not that ye be not judged” – is perhaps the most ignored verse in the entire Bible.  

Despite Matthew’s command, pretty much everyone judges other people – which includes pretty much everyone who comments on the items on ESU’s Facebook page.  

Here’s a recent ESU post: 

That post really brought the Matthew 7:1 nonbelievers out of the woodwork.  Here are the comments of just a few of the people who chose to judge rather than judge not:

Other commenters weren’t so quick to judge:

One wag was amused by the fact that not only did the commenters jump to conclusions, but that they jumped to diametrically opposed conclusions:

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Here’s another ESU post that inspired a lot more judging than judging not:

Most of the comments were along the lines of this one:

A couple of amateur lawyers decided to offer their two cents’ worth:

This commenter certainly has a point:

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Maybe the commenters should have blamed the thief instead of the victim, but I look at it this way.  

Let’s say I want to watch a football game while I’m eating lunch, so I bring a roast beef sandwich into the family room and put it on the coffee table so I can eat while and watching TV from my sofa.  But I forgot my beer, so I go back into the kitchen – leaving my roast beef sandwich sitting unguarded on my coffee table.

When my dog trots over and gobbles down the sandwich, are you really going to blame the dog – who’s just doing what comes naturally?

Or are you going to blame me for forgetting that eternal vigilance is the price of not having your roast beef sandwich gobbled down by your dog?

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Bob Dylan’s “Do Right to Me Baby (Do Unto Others)” was released in 1979 on Slow Train Coming, which was the first album he released after converting to Christianity.

In 2018, Bettye Lavette released Things Have Changed, an album consisting entirely of covers of Dylan songs – including “Do Right to Me Baby”:  

With all due respect to Dylan, Lavette’s cover is much more listenable.  Click here to listen to it.

Click below to buy the record from Amazon:

Kanye West (ft. Mos Def) – "Drunk and Hot Girls" (2007)

Driving around town

Looking for the best spot

For the drunk and hot girls

Eastern Shore Undercover is a social media-based news source for the good citizens of the lower Eastern Shore region of Maryland – Wicomico and Worcester Counties, to be precise. 

Click here to visit its website, which has links you can use to follow Eastern Shore Undercover on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram.

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Most of Eastern Shore Undercover’s content relates to incidents that resulted in calls to local police and sheriff’s departments.  (It looks like they get much of their information by monitoring law enforcement radio communications.) 

There are items relating to complaints about domestic abuse, illegal panhandling, public intoxication and drug use, fights, and various other low crimes and misdemeanors – as well as 911 calls about traffic accident injuries, heart attacks, and the like. 

Here’s a recent Eastern Shore Undercover Facebook post that caught my eye: 

As you can see, that post had attracted 259 comments at the time I viewed it.  

No surprise that most of the comments were from men:

But quite a few ladies chimed in as well:

I have to say that the women of Salisbury, MD sound like they are a lot of fun:

Last but certainly not least:

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We’ll feature some more Eastern Shore Undercover items in the next 2 or 3 lines.

In the meantime, click here to enjoy “Drunk and Hot Girls” from Kanye West’s best-selling 2007 album, Graduation.  (I don’t know if the young lady walking around the Irish Penny Pub & Grill parking lot nekkid as a jaybird was hot, but she must have been very, very drunk – after all, it was below freezing in Salisbury that night.)

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: