The Silversun Pickups Less Fun than Staring

Pictured: Ethan Hawke. A pretentious douchebag whose work is derivative of greater artists and also most likely a roadie for the Silversun Pickups.

I was in the gym several times over the past weeks, lifting weights as only I can, and on the flatscreens they would periodically play a music video from some band that I've never heard of called the Silversun Pickups. Now, it's probably important to tell you that they play music over what is actually on the flatscreens, thus negating the purpose of having flatscreens in the gym at all. If they want to show me an inspiring visual image while I get my lift on, I would rather they show my hypnotoad instead of MTVU. At least hypnotoad is likely to get me to sync my movements with his hypnotism so that I'll be working out with an optimal heart rate at a solid 130 beats per minute.

So, back to the Silversun Pickups. I was a little skeptical about their music for a number of reason. For starters, their bassist is a broad who looks like a young Allison Janney, and usually having a female musician in the band is a telltale sign that the music will blow. As far as I can remember, I have never rocked out to a female musician in any capacity, just as sure as I've never laughed at a joke of a single female comedian (I'm looking at you Margaret Cho, Ellen Degeneres, and Wande Sykes). The only band where I can even remotely remember this dynamic working is Sonic Youth, and that's mostly in spite of Kim Gordon, since Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo are so outstanding that their riffs often drown out the vocals to songs that Kim is trying to ruin. On the other hand, their video had what appeared to be hot models playing musical chairs, which I thought appeared sexy on the surface.

Well, it came as little surprise to me that when I finally listened to this video during a period of YouTubeage that it sucked hard.

Their lead singer sounds like Billy Corgan, only if he was to mainline even more estrogen. All of the male band members have stupid facial hair and lame hipster beards like Ethan Hawke in the picture up top. The sound of the band combined the shittiest parts of Sonic Youth, the Smashing Pumpkins, Nada Surf and a string of other 90's bands whose memory lead singer Brian Aubert has chosen to take a dump on. Throw in a few riffs that sound like the shittiest songs the Strokes played in their early years and you pretty much have this band pegged.

However, I couldn't shake the feeling that there is probably a core following of Hipster douchebags who think that this band is great and who yearn for a crappy Smashing Pumpkins tribute band. Thanks to the fine people at Amazon, I was able to confirm this hypothesis. I could almost imagine most of the reviewers sitting at their Mac Notebooks in a Starbucks in Brooklyn or Portland, taking time off of writing the screenplay that they've been working on for the last 3 years to push their Rivers Cuomo glasses further up their noses and hunker down to write a music review that is an exercise in pretension.

Woogie Boogie, Hipsters...Woogie Boogie.

Hating on UClown

Seen here: Students of The Gunnery, who are better served on the Quidditch pitch than trying to run wild on my game at the gym, on the field, or in the club.


If there is one school that has shot up my rankings for hatred it is the University of Connecticut, or as they are known in esteemed circles UClown.

Let’s start off on reasons to hate UClown, shall we? For starters, what the Hell is up with the way they spell their name? How is the second ‘c’ in Connecticut a silent ‘c’? Shouldn’t it be pronounced Connect-i-cut or in the alternate, spelled Conneticut? I try to avoid unnecessary surplusages, specifically in the form of redundant consonants.

What are they connecting the dots, La-la-la-la? If you’re going to rip off a bit from Pee Wee in your name, at least make it something cool, like having the King of Cartoons as your mascot. That would be unreal, unlike that albino Husky that they have.

Yes, that’s right. The Whitest state in the Union takes the Whitest mammal in the animal kingdom as its mascot.

Another reason that UClown is lame is because it takes the weakest parts of two of the most wretched fanbases in professional sports and grafts them onto each other. So, you get the long-suffering fans of Joke Sox Nation, who have been members since their high school fuck buddy bought them one of those stupid red hats in ’05 (or a stupid pink Joke Sox hat; wouldn’t want to forget about the ladies) as well as all the pansy Yankees fans who grew up in suburban Connecticut, whose parents commute an hour each way to avoid the hellhole that is NYC, but claim the Bronx.

Yet perhaps the greatest reason to hate on UClown is their fanbase yapping about Donyell Marshall this, and Emeka Okafor that. Yo, I get it. You have some Final Four banners and we don’t. But don’t deny that Jamie has matched Cryhoun move for move since taking over and that guys who maxed out as college players like Chevy Troutman haven’t beaten your All-Americans’ assess senseless. Which doesn’t even count the times that DeJuan Blair beat Has Been Thabeet’s ass so hard that Cryhoun didn’t know whether to complain to the refs or to call Child Welfare Services to handle the Big Fella.

This brings us to this week’s topic of discussion. UClown is taking on our Panthers in football. Notice the double-standard that they can dis Pitt for not having any Final Fours yet, but when we point out their lack of history and success as footballers, they respond that they have only had a real team for like a decade. Don’t bring that weak sauce up into my barbecue, UClown. The reason you have no history is that all the cake eaters at Westover, Choate, The Gunnery are too soft to play for any real team.

Bottom line, this week it’s time to slap around UClown from the moment that all 53 players that they intend to dress drive out onto the field and start piling out of their undersized Volkswagen and putting on their big red cleats.

And if you see anybody on the streets this week wearing a Joke Sox hat, you should punch them in the face just incase he is a UClown sympathizer.

The Shhh Heard Round the World...

...Or more appropriately, the column that first got me Shot in Denver.

There is a sports columnist for some rag called the LA Times named Andrew Malcolm, and apparently he doesn't like us. Like, any of us. According to this LA Slimeball, he doesn't think much about anybody who is from the Steel City, claims its teams, or has probably ever lived there. I have excerpted his most spurious claims with the original text in italics. Special thanks to the writers from Fire Joe Morgan for the way that their point-counterpoint technique woks on the Internets.


What's With Obama and Pittsburgh, of all places?

President Obama, who couldn't muster enough interest to drive several blocks from the White House to watch the exciting Washington Capitals during the professional hockey playoffs last spring, has instead invited the hockey team from somewhere in western Pennsylvania all the way over to the presidential residence today.

That's because Presidents traditionally invite championship teams to the White House for official visits. The fact that Pittsburgh has won two this year means that two teams werre invited. Throw in the Phillies for a Commonwealth hat trick. Is it the best use of taxpayer resources? No. It's a glorified photo up, but if Ovechjoke wins the Cup, I'm sure they will get invited as well.

The Pittsburgh team is champion of something called the National Hockey League, which really should be called the International Hockey League since it's got teams in the U.S. and Canada.

Or maybe the North American Hockey League? Still, that's funny denying the existence of something that you know full fucking well exists. Watch me give it a try. "Andrew Malcolm's ancestors should have been exterminated in 'something called The Holocaust'."

Last winter the American president, who grew up in those known hockey hotbeds of Indonesia and Hawaii, cheered for Pittsburgh's once-woebegone football team because its owner campaigned for him.

Hmmm. Let me parse this assertion. Apparently if you grew up somewhere that they didn't play hockey, you cannot also appreciate American football. Also, let me look up the definition of "woebegone."

It means 1) Affected or marked by deep sorrow, grief or wretchedness 2) Of an inferior or a deplorable condition.

Does this guy realize that the Steelers have won 6 Super Bowls, 19 divisions, and have been perennially in the playoffs for the better part of 35 years? Indeed that means they have been the most successful franchise over the span of three generations of men. Sure they were "woebegone" in the 1950s, but by that logic, any team that fell on hard times or didn't win championships for a long stretch is "once woebegone." That means the Yankees pre-1923, the Red Sox from 1918 until a few years ago, the Green Bay Packers from 1966 until 1996, etc.


And later this month Obama has invited the G-20, the so-called Group of 20 really important global finance ministers and central bank governors, to hold a crucial two-day summit in that ...

... place, if their pilots can find it on the map. Sure, Joe Biden fled the state. But Pennsylvania has a lot of electoral votes and that turncoat old senator who's now a Democrat.

Go to Philly and bang a left, jackass.

But Pittsburgh?

Yes.

Pittsburgh?

Nice redundancy. Once again, yes. I mean, why would it possibly be appropriate to invite some of the world's leading economists to visit a city that drastically overhauled its local economy from manufacturing-based to service and tech-based and reinvented itself in the process. I mean, it's not like we are in the largest global recession in decades, right?

The Pittsburgh Penguins are named for a bird unable to fly that doesn't live anywhere near that city.

Ever heard of a literary device called "alliteration?" And hold on a second you bombastic bitch-ass (more alliteration at work). How fucking stunned are you going to be when you wake up tomorrow and realize that LA has no lakes (the Lakers came from Minnesotta), no Clippers (a team stolen from San Diego), no Kings, no Dodgers (Brooklyn's old baseball team was called the "Trolley Dodgers." Any trolleys in LA?), no Angels (god has forsaken that shithole years ago), no Trojans (unless USC changed their mascot to a box of rubbers, Trojans are to be found in Asia Minor), etc.

After losing ignominiously in 2008, this year the Pens won something called the Stanley Cup.

Hey, yo. Nathaniel Hawthorne. I also read The Scarlet Letter, and 'Ignominously' means 'shamefully.' I watched the series and the Penguins lost in 6 games to one of the most dominant hockey dynasties of all time. Even still, we nearly tied the deciding game as time expired to force overtime and maybe even a Game 7. Yes, we were outclassed in that series, but it wasn't our time yet. On the other hand, 2009 was our time to get to the next level. And yet, you resort for the second time in about 100 words to the literary device of feigning ignorance on something notoriously known, i.e. that the Stanley Cup exists. Let's try this exercise again. "After masquerading as a sports columnist, Andrew Malcolm slid this dogshit column past something called an editor."

Winning that trophy is a very big deal -- in Canada, whose teams have been unable to capture North America's oldest professional sports trophy since seven years back into the last century when a club from somewhere in Quebec sneaked passed the Los Angeles Gretzkys, four games to one.

Yo, fuckface. It's called 'the Google.' If you are so unsure about what these things are called, have a fucking intern be your fact-checker. And, I assure you that winning the Stanley Cup is a big deal in other hockey markets as well. Fucking Anaheim won it just a few years back! Did you sleep through this event?

The cup is a very heavy trophy -- see the team captain struggle with it in the photo above [Editor's note: The article has a picture of Sid holding up the Cup] -- awarded to the first NHL team to win 16 playoff games after 82 regular season games. That's a hard thing to do.

I have absolutely no idea what to make of this paragraph. Is he minimizing the physical toll and skill involved in playing a rigorous regular season schedule and playoffs over the span of 9 months? As a sports writer, is he unfamiliar with the concept of a playoffs-style sports tournament deciding the champion? I mean, it only happens in baseball, football, NBA and college basketball, high school sports, the World Cup, bowling...

And hockey is a hard game to play with sticks and armored elbows, skating at some 20 miles an hour around opponents approaching at similar speeds and, in between fights, shooting a 7-ounce chunk of rubber at 90+ miles an hour toward a man willingly standing there to stop it.

Admittedly, I am not an engineer, but I still remember enough about physics to know that Force = Mass * Acceleration. Thus, somebody skating towards me and weighing 225 lbs. or an object with smaller mass and a greater velocity accelerating towards me would fuck up my day.

Which explains why every NHL club employs a team dentist.

So, hockey sucks because they are concerned with oral hygiene?

The city of Pittsburgh was founded in the early 1800s by Pennsylvanians who weren't strong enough to make it all the way to Ohio or were rejected at that border.

Well, we can't all have been founded by Spanish missionaries looking to ethnically and culturally cleanse the indigenous population.

There, at the junction of two dinky Pennsylvania streams that form the mighty Ohio River, they built a city based on making steel. They've had running water, sewers and electricity there for years now.

Yes, infrastructure is quite useful in urban and regional planning. In fact, we've had these things a lot longer than LA.

But when the steel-making thing didn't work out, the rusting burgh turned to building sports stadiums so its people could wave yellow towels and scream obscenities at visiting teams.

Yeah, we can't all have traditions as awesome as lame thundersticks and a rally monkey.

That has actually turned out pretty well for people into that sort of thing. As many Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters recall, the state of Pennsylvania is that place that primary candidate Obama was caught on tape saying was full of bitter small-town losers clinging to their guns and religion. He seems to have changed his tune now.

She won the Democratic primary there. But he won the party nomination and the support of the football team's owner. And Obama returned that support at his successful, taxpayer-financed White House Super Bowl party last winter, cheering against Phoenix. See what Arizona gets for electing John McCain?

So, the president isn't allowed to drink a few beers during the largest sporting event of the year? Had any other AFC team been in the game, would Obama have boycotted it and spent the evening prepping a new stimulus plan? Would McCain have not watched the game had he won the general election?

In fact, the Pittsburgh football team has won so many Super Bowl trophies that the Democrat president may consider passing some of them out to other cities because in a country that can put a man on the moon, no one should feel left out or uncovered.

Wait, you are conceding that the Steelers have won many tropies? Doesn't this go to my earlier argument that the team isn't woebegone and hasn't been in years? I also don't get the joke about creating a "Lombardi Trophy stimulus."

After nearly moving to Kansas City or back to Canada because they too wanted a new arena, this past year the Pittsburgh hockey team hired enough Canadians and Russians to defeat Detroit's Canadians and Scandinavians in the cup finals that so many people missed on TV.

The TV ratings seem to disagree, but once again, don't let facts get in the way of a perfectly pedestrian column.

They'll likely miss today's White House ceremony too because it's conveniently planned for dinnertime, which means fewer U.S. TV crews will bother.

So, Obama should plan every photo op during Prime Time like it's the State of the Union Address? You realize that you work for a newspaper, don't you Colonel Fuckington? Do you report the news in real time or do you write about shit that happened the previous day? You realize that news networks share footage, so it's not like the entire White House press corps needs to show up, right? I mean, the very nature of this ceremony is the entire reason why nobody should bother. It's a photo op where the President gets a framed jersey from a championship team. He's not going to sit down with Sid and Mr. Lemieux and ask them their opinions about a single-payer system of health care.

Having read this column, I find it hard to believe that you write for a dying medium.

The Origin

They Shot Us in Denver came about due to the insane demand (read three emails) that I got from my friends concerning a forthcoming post.

I wanted to title the blog something dealing with Pittsburgh sports. Originally, the title was meant to be "They Shot Me in Denver," a reference to a famous clip of former Steeler Joey Porter after a playoff win over Indy.

Unfortunately that name was already taken by somebody who has a whopping one post in almost 18 months. Thanks a lot you cybersquatting fuckstick!

So, what the hell, why should I (and Peezy) be the only ones shot in Denver? Why not make sure that all my friends also get shot in Denver.