The Cold Shoulder

Posted on January 19, 2019 by

Mind if I join ya for dinner?

No matter the season, no matter the weather… squirrels can be counted on to come out and look cute searching for food.  You can also best believe they aren’t going to let any of their furry comrades anywhere near their own personal stake.  I watched last weekend as one squirrel laid claim to the entirety of the feed I put in the birdbath feeder… while another squirrel froze his butt off in the snow trying to get a taste of that good stuff.  All to no avail… the greedy sciurine in the bowl was not about to share.  No matter how adorable the poor, freezing squirrel looked in his desperation…

Aw, come on, man! Please!!! The Care Bears are gonna kick your ass!

Look! We’re twinsies! Now can I come up there with you?

Fine, be that way. I’ll just lay under the tree over here and starve and have my death weigh on your conscience the rest of your life…

Poor, hungry Saturday Squirrel.  I guess he could always eat the yellow snow…

Have a great weekend everyone!

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Snow Day

Posted on January 17, 2019 by

I shouldn’t have to be out in this shit!

Last Friday my locale had one of its biggest snowstorms since 2014 with a whopping six to ten feet inches of the white stuff predicted.  While everyone else was out raiding the supermarkets buying the necessary supplies to make french toast for the next six weeks, I made the daring decision that evening to snap a seven year streak of perfect attendance and take the night off work.  With how poorly my new car seems to do in the snow compared to the 20th century beast I used to drive that was actually made to drive worth a shit… plus with the snowfall continuing to accumulate all night long, it seemed like a good idea to take my very first snow day since I was in high school in 1993.

If only I had a squirrel sled…

Dipping my ruler into the snow that morning (No, not THAT ruler!) revealed the final tally to be on the light side of the 6-10 expected… but it was still a pretty solid coating.  Geez, look what it did to my birdbath squirrel feeder!

Eh, let the squirrels eat cake.

Seriously… that’s what it looks like!

I don’t think my backyard mooches are going to appreciate me taking a snow day from feeding them.  Guess I’ll have to get a little cold…

They better tip me for this…

I got some nice squirrels pics on my snow day which will fill up the next few of my Saturday posts.  After sticking around for a few days, yesterday and today has been warm enough to finally have the snow melting.  I can see bits and pieces of the ground again.  But for a few days, we all had to suffer in the cold with the dandruff of the gods…

I hope Gypsy has some snow leopard in her ancestry…

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Mercury Poisoning

Posted on January 16, 2019 by

Welcome to another edition on the blog feature where one person’s digital trash is going to turn into my creative treasure.  It’s time to conjure up another picture and give it the Random Image Inspiration treatment!  Since I got a snow day (snow night?) from work Friday, I’m going to put extra that time to use by putting this entire thing together in the wee hours of Saturday morning.  The random numbers, please….

15, 50, 65, 43

The allegedly random numbers at random.org sure seem to come up with a lot of multiples of five.  Oh well, here’s how those four numbers played out four days ago…

The 15th post in my Reader was this one by Pam and Teddy

The 50th word in that post is “I”

The 65th word in that post is “it’s”

Well, that’s pretty generic, huh?  Who knows what that will bring up….

Typing “I it’s” into Google Image Search brought this up as the 43rd result….

First off… since I’m writing this four days before it actually posts, I sincerely hope nothing actually happens to Queen Elizabeth before this goes live.  That would be very awkward…

You better damn well believe it would be, squirrel!

This may be an album cover from The Smiths, but I’m going to use a different band as my inspiration…

Spare us out lives from this monstrosity.

Queen is fine.  I mean, their songs are mostly alright.  I could honestly stand to never hear “Fat Bottom Girls” again in my life.  I admit to never being a fan of “We Will Rock You” or “We Are The Champions.”  ‘Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Another One Bites the Dust” are starting to wear awfully thin due to the excessive overplay.  But other than all that, you know, they’re still….. alright.

Congratulations to Queen, the latest winner of the ambivalent Meh Award…

Unfortunately for my music listening pleasure, Queen airplay has been trending in the opposite direction of what I’d prefer.  Thanks to some movie about the life of Freddie Mercury that was a huge hit late last year, their music has become trendy again… and radio stations think we want to hear even more of the same songs they’ve been shoving down our throats since the legend of the leotard originally died in 1991.  I’ve about had my fill of the same five Queen songs getting played everywhere there’s an atmosphere conducive to carrying sound waves, and I’m getting sick and tired of the questionable lionization of Freddie Fucking Mercury…

You’re just jealous, bitch!

It’s like three years ago when Prince took his last ride on the purple elevator.  Another overplayed musician who I didn’t particularly care for had now suddenly become the greatest performer since The San Diego Chicken and I had to listen to “When Doves Cry” and “Kiss” until that whiny little Prince voice made my eardrums rupture.  Just stop it.  Prince wasn’t all that, and Freddie Mercury wasn’t all that either.  Anyone can dance and prance around on stage like a lunatic after raiding their sister’s wardrobe.  That’s what the glam era was all about.  But to do so in front of millions of people while sporting the world’s cheesiest porn mustache and looking like you’d just spent the last ten hours lifting weights in a sauna is just too much.  Hell, it took a third rate Saturday Night Live skit like”Wayne’s World” just to put you back on the map in the 90’s after you were on the long road to being forgotten.

Everything sounds better when you’re stoned out of your mind…. so I’m told.

So to those out there who are trying to prop up the Mercury mystique while also hoping to rake in a bunch of cash off the sweat covered back of a dead man…. please go find something else to do.  Freddie and Queen are fine as ambient noise in the background of music history.  But they weren’t the second coming of The Beatles… or even The Platters.  When it comes to the Bohemian Rhapsody fueled resurgence in Freddie Mercury’s popularity… I will be very glad when the Queen is finally dead.

Drag queens never die, honey! They just have to eventually use the men’s room!

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Share Your World – Week 2

Posted on January 15, 2019 by

Remember that “Sharing is Caring”… or the Care Bears will kick your ass.

It’s time for The Nest’s newest Tuesday feature where we don our virtual hipster sunglasses and answer Melanie B. Cee’s ever popular Share Your World prompt for this week!  After all the fun I had last week, of course I was going to come back for more.  Time for a pop of color on this drab blog…

This is your world on drugs. Any questions?

1. You’re walking in a forest and you find a black suitcase.  Inside it is one millions dollars and a piece of paper, stained in blood and bearing the single word “Don’t!”  Would you take the suitcase home or leave it?

Is this million dollars tax free? (eye roll emoji)

Evil Squirrel! You behave yourself now!!!!

Hell yeah I’d take the suitcase!  The money is useless.  The serial numbers are no doubt consecutive and traceable by law enforcement… and probably splattered in the blood of innocent victims.  In American currency, there’d have to be at least 10,000 individual bills crammed in that thing… that’s a lot of jack to try to fit in your wallet.  I’d definitely dump the money out onto the ground.  But you never know when you might need a nice, evil looking black suitcase that could have belonged to a James Bond villain.  I’ll bet it’d make a top notch Shelf Critter Theatre prop…

Perfect for storing dead possums…

2. Imagine you lapsed and cheated on your partner. You feel horrible and you know you’ll never do it again, because the feeling is so awful. Would you confess?

MITZI: Like, hai all you cutey patooties out there!  I’m, like, Mitzi the Bimbocorn… and since Evil Squirrel totally doesn’t have any partners to sneak around on, I’m going to pretend to totally be his honey boo boo!  Now, Mitzi’s a girl who believes in, like, doing your own thang!  So I’d totally be okie dokies with mister squirrely whirly, like, having sexay times with other girlies.  Or boysies.  Or bothsies.  Whatevs.  Mitzi would, like, never judge!

But Mitzi’s, like, still going to keep your cheating ass tied up, just in case!

3. Would you live your life differently if nobody ever judged you for anything you did?

Everyone would live differently if our species were not a naturally judgmental one.  I refuse to believe there is anyone out there (at least who is currently sober) who isn’t at least somewhat self conscious of what other people would think about certain aspects of them.  Then again, I’m broadcasting to the world that I play with stuffed critters on my blog and give them all kinds of  strange and messed up personalities…

Come with us to the padded room, Mr. Squirrel. My men in white coats will never judge your crazy ass!

4. Would a fly without wings be called a walk? No? What would you call it?

Who needs wings to fly?  Flying squirrels don’t have wings.  Helicopters don’t have wings.  Maybe a fly would still fly if you were cruel enough to remove its wings rather than just splat the thing with that icky plastic flyswatter that’s hanging in the kitchen by the 1980’s telephone with the 50 foot long cord.  If you took the bell out of that telephone, would you still say it rang?  Nevermind… phones don’t actually ring anymore and yet they still “ring”…

They don’t make ’em like they used to, huh Art?

Non-numbered bonus Pollyanna question: What’s something that brought joy and lightness of being to you this past week?

Seeing the results of all the scared little sheep in my town panic buying last Thursday and Friday due to an impending snowstorm.  With all of the bread, milk and eggs we sold over the past few days, there’s going to be a LOT of french toast made over the coming week.  At least, I’d assume that’d be the case since people seem compelled to buy a two months supply of all three staples anytime it threatens to snow for some bizarre reason…

Get used to it, kid. You’ll be having it for breakfast until St. Patrick’s Day.  And it should be the proper color for the occasion by then…

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The Rockford Files

Posted on January 14, 2019 by

The theme song to the TV show would make an excellent DVA….. but not today.

You know what’s even more exciting than experiencing your first snow day since high school?  Realizing that Monday has finally arrived!  And nobody puts the YAY in MonYAY quite like The Nest does!  That’s the day we get out the snow shovels and dig up another frozen fossil from music’s Ice Age out of that igloo of lost frost we like to call the Dusty Vinyl Archive!  DJ Scratchy’s in full snowbunny mode this week with a variation on a familiar tune that apparently skiied itself into a chasm, while The Sponkies are just annoying everyone by playing “Let It Go” on repeat.  The forecast calls for 6 to 12 inches of the good stuff today…

The phrase “big in Japan” has become something of a cliche over the past half a century.  With America helping to rebuild and redefine the culture of Japan after World War II, the country that we once feared would buy out everything in the USA during the 80’s has in fact adopted a good chunk of our American ways into their modern society.  Occasionally, the Japanese would so thoroughly embrace something from the States that we just turned our Yankee noses up to… and we would just shake our heads and wonder why.  What’s up with those crazy Japanese anyway?

You clazy Americans have no room to tok.

In the mid 70’s, a quartet of rockers from beautiful downtown Rockford, Illinois tried and failed to make a name for themselves in the US.  That band was Cheap Trick, a group who has long been a household name in America.  But we didn’t put the dream police on the map… those wild and wacky groupies from Japan did.  Their first three albums, all released in 1977 and 1978 were largely flops stateside.  But in Japan….

OMG! We ❤ U Bun E.!

….all three of those albums went gold.  Interest was so frenzied, that the band agreed to tour Japan in ’78.  Cheap Trick was treated by the people of Japan very similar to the way people in the US treated four lads with bowl cuts who showed up on The Ed Sullivan Show one night in 1964.  They went absolutely fucking insane over one of our own rock acts that we didn’t seem to think much of at all.  Cheap Trick was the original “big in Japan.”

Who wouldn’t go gaga over Rick Nielsen’s guitar?

A live album was recorded from a pair of concerts Cheap Trick performed at Budokan in Tokyo.  It was only intended to be released to its gushing Japanese fanbase…. but apparently that live album somehow seeped into the US, and suddenly we realized that maybe we had missed something the Japanese picked up on.  Cheap Trick at Budokan was eventually released in the US to much success in 1979.  That live album spawned what is undoubtedly Cheap Trick’s most recognizable song… “I Want You To Want Me.”  The Budokan version of that song is still very much a staple of radio station playlists forty years later.  Let’s play it today for your listening pleasure…

Now you didn’t really think we were going to play you a song that was still popular, did you?  This is the Dusty Vinyl Archive, of course…

While the Budokan concert version of “I Want You To Want Me” is well known… it’s original studio version from the album In Color is much more obscure.  What, you didn’t think the song had a studio version?  Of course it did, silly!  They didn’t just make that song up to entertain Hello Kitty nation!  The original version of “I Want You To Want Me” was released as a single in the US shortly before their Japanese sojourn, and it bombed.  That’s too bad, because I like it better than the classic live version.  It’s definitely WAY different than how you’re used to hearing this song…

The studio version is a bit slower paced than its more familiar cousin, and definitely doesn’t have that high energy rock concert mentality of the Budokan version.  But it has a lot of more subdued and intricate details that I absolutely love!  This is practically like an anachronistic cover song given the fame the live version has because it sounds so different.  I felt the same love for this song the first time I heard its studio version that I did when I finally caught the album version of Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind,” another song whose inferior live recording is much better known than its studio origins…

It sounds even better when you listen to it through these funny glasses!

Please join me next Monday for another lost classic that is Big in DVA Land…

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