REPORTER RECOMMENDS

starting a cover band

Let’s face facts. Art is hard. Being forced to constantly bare your soul for someone else’s entertainment and validation is exhausting. Then there’s the whole issue of making enough money to move out of your mother’s basement. Then there’s trying to come up with a unique sound. But originality is overrated. Honestly, whatever kind of music you try and make will sound like something that’s already been done, so why bother?

With ticket prices going through the roof these days, there’s a real niche out there for people who are too cheap/poor to pay $80 to see the Foo Fighters. This is where you come in. Round up whichever of your friends made it through marching band with you, buy some pawned instruments and Google a few dozen guitar tabs. Start with weddings and Bar Mitzvahs, then move on to house parties and strip clubs. Before you know it, you’ll be swimming in offers to tour with other pretend bands. Just fake it ‘til you make it. And then keep on faking it.

HAIKU

One does not simply

Mistake a black umbrella

For a brown rifle.

OVERSEEN & OVERHEARD

“Listen pal, you’re one abortion away from not being here today!”

—Kid outside of Perkins Green

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS

My Celtic doom metal jazz trio McMiles Davis and the Glory of Satan got rejected from South by Southwest for the fifth year in a row. What does A$AP Rocky have that we don’t?

QUOTE

“Do not let a flattering woman coax and wheedle you and deceive you; she is after your barn.”

— Hesiod, Greek poet

STREAM OF FACTS

Saudi Arabian baboons sometimes kidnap feral puppies and raise them as pets. The two form a symbiotic relationship, and the dogs protect the baboons from THREATS.

The THREATS of the harmful gasses coming off of a comet once seemed so real that in 1910 some unscrupulous businessmen sold “anti-comet pills” to ward off the negative effects of Haley’s Comet. There is, of course, no health RISK associated with passing meteors.

The RISK of a robot apocalypse has been around longer than some might expect. In 1981, a factory worker in Japan was killed by a robot he was building when its arm malfunctioned and pushed him into a nearby grinding MACHINE.

The transportation MACHINE most often overlooked in terms of its pollution output is the ship. The 15 largest ships on the sea produce as much sulfur oxide pollution as all of the cars on Earth combined.

WORD OF THE WEEK

Ultion n. — The act of seeking vengeance or revenge.

After coming up 0.2 points short of making the Dean’s List, the outraged graduate student began planning his ultion.