December 31, 2007

The we eat what we like guide to New Year's Eve

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If you're like me, you're stuck in the Pioneer Valley with no NYE plans: Thurston and Kim haven't called, Mascis will probably be in bed by 7:30, and there aren't even any sweet local music & burrito venues. Here then, for your convenient perusal, are a few suggestions for ways to while away the hours, minutes, and seconds until the ball on top of the Hotel Northampton rises on 2008.

Fireworks!
At 6:15 there will be fireworks shooting off of the downtown parking garage. It's a salute to fireworks, Northampton style.

Watch all eight episodes of The Assistant, get nostalgic for four years ago.
Andy Dick's website has posted the entire one season run of The Assistant, a sort-of-fake-but-also-real reality show spoof that ran on MTV in 2004. While occasionally funny, the most interesting element is how innocent it seems compared to MTVs more recent run of reality programming. There are no groan-worthy double entendres, no contestants trying to give themselves away for sex, and while the show's situations and talking-head interviews may be contrived and/or scripted, they seem thousands of times more natural than those on Next or Parental Control. Unlike the cast of the Real World, the contestants - most in their early 20s - come across as extremely earnest, more eager to win the coveted position of "Personal Assistant to Andy Dick" than to play any of reality TV's archetypal characters.

8-Track Porn Party
Over the course of the year, the audio curio blog Dinosaur Gardens has posted a number of digital recordings taken from '70s era "adult 8-tracks". Lacking any visual element, stories with names like The Lustful Sexlife of a Perverted Nympho Housewife, Apartment #69, Suck and Screw Orgy, and Fornicating Female Freaks rely heavily on blue language, over the top imagery, and play-by-play narration. While I have trouble imagining how anyone could have found these erotic 35 years ago, the dated, actorly voices serve as unsettling reminders that these women are either grandmothers or dead by now.

So 2007
There is also a Radiohead webcast, if you're not completely over them already.

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