for 14 January 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.
|
|
Filler Subject: Dead can dance but deadheads ... C'mon, do you really think that "fans" of Dead Can Dance music dance better than whirling dervish hippies? I appreciate the music of both of these bands and kinda picture the "... Can Dance" crowd doing pretty much the same moves as Jerry's kids. Fare thee well. Daniel Corvino Trenton, New Jersey <DANCORV@aol.com> You just had to go and bring the handicapped into this, didn't you? I stand behind my original assertion. Sure, goths don't dance so damn well. But no one dances as badly as deadheads. They always look like they're trying to wriggle themselves out of one of those really skinny sleeping bags. Man, I hate those really skinny sleeping bags. As if anyone would want to keep their legs right next to each other all night. What a curse! I also hate hacky-sack. What an annoying game. I would never play it, personally, because I have no foot-eye coordination. But most of all I dislike watching people play it. Especially when they're trying to play it "with style." You know what I mean. I also dislike watching people play "Tangled Up in Blue." Particularly with one of those plastic Yamaha guitars, particularly with one foot on the coffee table, particularly with a faux-scratchy voice in the middle of an otherwise OK party with a faux-sincere look on their face, particularly when they insist on looking you right in the eye and singing right at you. Greg Carter is to blame for most of this stuff. Are you happy now, Greg? Are you? Anyway, rah rah to Trenton, New Jersey. Trenton makes; the world takes! Polly  Dear Polly, I'm getting sick of having to pretend I have a positive attitude and forcing smiles toward my fellow co-workers. The only time they bug me is when they have a problem. Why is this so? Disgruntled Employee It's a bummer working with other people, isn't it? I, for one, hate it, as is well documented in three years of Filler. I particularly disliked working with Owen Thomas, who not only bugged me when he had a problem but also bugged me when he had something totally unimportant to say, something that had no impact on his or my immediate job duties but that compromised my ability to do my job and reduced my overall job satisfaction considerably. Now Owen tries to interrupt me in the same way via email, but luckily I have a filter on my email that sends all emails from Owen straight into a very special mailbox. Let's call it the Owen mailbox, just to be polite, but it also serves a more general purpose, so its actual name, in accordance with this more general function, is Trash. Anyway, I'm not sure why your co-workers bug you so much. Maybe your co-workers are annoying people, or maybe you're a real jerk just like me. Either way, I'd suggest you tell them to submit their concerns and problems to you via email, and then set up your email filters accordingly. Gruntled, Polly Polly, I stretched, yawned, and read filler. I crammed down three glazed doughnuts — not Krispy Kremes, but we have one in Arlington — and drank some water. Then I wrote these words to YOU. For crying out loud, "What size are the guns?" Nate Dallas No dumb Hotmail address I don't know what that means. Is that a lyric or some kind of timely reference I should know or some kind of a reference to something I wrote that I should really know? I don't know. I'm glad you're eating doughnuts, at any rate. Polly Subject: HELP! Reading your column gives me insight into the female soul. It's a lot like vertigo. Tim Hundsdorfer <timh@ucar.edu> Insight into the female soul? Good god, man. You should know I have no soul. But, speaking of females and vertigo, I was on a bus to the airport in Newark, New Jersey, about a week ago, and there were some high school girls sitting behind me on the bus, which was kind of interesting and slightly horrifying. They were looking at photos, and one of them kept saying, "Every. Single. One. of Josh's friends are soooo cute. I mean, all his friends are totally cute." This reminded me of this radio ad for a televised version of Sweet Valley High, in which the kids go on some kind of a vacation cruise, and this girl says to a boy in a very seductive voice, "I think you're the hottest guy on the boat." It used to be so simple, you know. You just picked the most attractive person in the room, and if he didn't like you, you'd go for the second most attractive, and so on. Knowing a "Josh" is justifiable cause for celebration, given the circumstances. When we got to their terminal, one of the girls said, "Are we, like, there?" Not, like, there, Polly Polly, you're wonderful. Tell your editor we want to hear more about how you were a cheerleader. Kirsten Emmott <kbemmott@ark.com> Cool! People like you really ruin the content around here for the rest of our readers, but oh well. Screw them. The best part about being a cheerleader was that it got me a date with a senior when I was just a sophomore. This was important, because everyone in my own grade remembered how disconcertingly unsexy I was in junior high, when my nose grew to its current size a full two years before the rest of my face caught up with it. In junior high I also had bad skin, the body of a pear, and the personality of a pet rock, but let's let bygones be bygones, shall we? Anyway, cheerleaders naturally get more booty. You know, you're wearing a little baby doll outfit, essentially, and that really appeals to teenage boys — and men, for that matter. Men love to see women looking very infantile and sort of silly and innocent. Naturally, this is somewhat disturbing to most intelligent women. But once all that feminist rage wears off and we can barely remember what Adrienne Rich was trying to say way back when, we use this situation to our advantage by wearing knee socks and go-go boots and the occasional pair of braids and by dressing up as Catholic schoolgirls for Halloween. It's a blatant manipulation, sure, and it's pretty unsavory. But if you've never dressed up as a Catholic schoolgirl and you'd really like to snag a man, if only for a few hours ... OK, so, I guess my point is: I'm most definitely NOT wonderful. Setting the record straight, Polly Shill Life Destiny: Uh huh, clever and, finally, trivial when you figure that the diatribe that shows up in Suck is owned by Wired is owned by Condé Nast, which knows a thing or two about shilling: Do you think it's worried? Sympathetically, a former Condé Nast employee A former Condé Nast employee who doesn't do his homework. Suck has never been owned by Condé Nast. Do you think we'd be bothering with these pestering emails if we had Newhouse bucks to keep us amused? Yr pal, Tim Editor, Suck "The brilliantly counterrevolutionary Monkees TV series ..." Was this statement serious or not? You didn't seem to have phrased it sarcastically, but it sounds like there's no way a statement like that could be serious. That's an honest question. I wouldn't know, I was born in the '80s and my memories of the Monkees TV show is limited to one single freeze frame from what, as far as I can tell, was the only episode I ever watched. (I must've been about 4. And I only watched about three minutes of it. I think.) (I seem to remember it being pretty stupid.) (For some TOTALLY unknown reason, I still remember what the theme song sounds like.) Anyway, one unintended side-product of creating products for the sole purpose of marketing is that you accidentally slap a time limit on whatever product you're selling. For example, the Mario Bros./Legend of Zelda cereal (they actually put two separate bags in the same box; one for each cereal) they sold in the late '80s actually tasted really good. But eventually, when Mario Bros. 2/Legend of Zelda 2 faded from view as the games themselves became older and older, the cereal, of course, faded along with it, despite the fact the cereal itself could have stood up perfectly well on its own. I'd say some more on this subject, but quite frankly, it's all a massive blur in my mind, along with everything else about the '80s. I think back and all I see is a massive soup of meaningless, conflicting images. Nintendo. Garfield the cat. Some TV show called Captain Nintendo, of which you were never, ever able to figure out the plot, no matter how much you watched it. (I now realize there was no plot, but at the time I wondered if the show was supposed to make some kind of sense.) Another TV show called Yo Yogi, which was, apparently, the Yogi bear cartoons relocated in, god knows why, a mall (I still wonder if that really was a Saturday morning cartoon, or if I just hallucinated that one). Big Bird. Apple IIc games. Pee-wee Herman. Kriss Kross. Nickelodeon. Zillions magazine (whatever that was). Weird Al Yankovich. A dull, distant awareness of the existence of Ronald Regan. And, of course, the dizzying, never-ending melodrama of the constantly shifting cereal aisle at Randalls and the commercials that provided the accompanying dialog. I'm sure this email makes no sense, but neither did the '80s from the viewpoint of a small child. And I suspect that's largely the fault of the advertising agencies. You should have realized Western culture was totally dead the instant you found out they actually sold a record called A Star Wars Christmas. Andrew McClure <mcclure111@earthlink.net> OK, we're used to twentysomethings reminiscing about '70s cartoons and TV shows and games. But teenagers reminiscing about the '80s? Aren't you a little young to be reminiscing, little boy? Hey 19, that's the Gipper! He don't remember king of the soulless! But anyway, are you related to Ian McClure, the guy on those instructional videos on The Simpsons? Just wondering, the Sucksters Subject: Christ, that was long. I didn't finish. Sorry, I usually do. David Marino-Nachison <DavidM@ fool.com> Yeah, yeah. That's what they all say. It's OK, man. It's perfectly normal not to finish. Your supportively worded and informative brochure, "It's Perfectly Normal Not to Finish," is in the mail! the Sucksters |
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||
   |
||||||||||||||||||||
 |  |
|||||||||||||||||||
 |   | |||||||||||||||||||
![[Tim Cavanaugh]](/fish/staff/images/tim.gif)
![[Copy Edit]](/fish/staff/images/copyeditors.gif){kind=small}
![[Phillip Bailey]](/fish/staff/images/phil.gif){kind=small}
![[yes, it's
a plunger. i'll l
eave the rest up to your imagination ... ]](/fish/staff/images/erin.gif){kind=small}
![[Brian
Forsyth, " we're just spanning time "]](/fish/staff/images/brian.gif)
![[the fixin'
pixie... ]](/fish/staff/images/emily.gif)
![[Ian
Connelly]](/fish/staff/images/ian.gif){kind=small}