Porocrom’s Crappaper

Yes children, uncle Crommunist is back with another edition of…

This issue, we examine a Canadian band that is poised to take off like gangbusters. I recently had the immense pleasure of seeing these guys live as part of a beer promotion that came to my school. I got into the show for free because a friend of mine snagged me a ticket (you rule, Jeff). I had heard a bit of this band, and I wasn’t really super-excited about them, but the show changed all of that. I have been to a few rock shows in my time, but nothing I’ve ever seen or heard even comes close to the hard rockin’ show put forth by:

The Trews

My first exposure to the Trews was their single Not Ready to Go from their second album “House of Ill Fame”. It’s a pretty hard-rockin’ but straightforward song, and I wasn’t particularly impressed until I heard the second single Tired of Waiting

I am wired and fading
Looking blind and blaming
Following and trailing
Words you might be saying

I am tired of waiting,
I’m tired of waiting, I am tired

I grabbed a few tracks of theirs and was suitably impressed. They kind of sat in the back of my brain for a while until I heard they were playing at UW, so I thought I would give them a listen. My life was changed that night.

Touring on the strength of their recent disc “Den of Thieves” the Trews brought a rock show that blew away anything else I’ve seen live. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any band put that much into a live show before. I don’t know what these Nova Scotia lads are having for breakfast, but I’ll imagine their wives/girlfriends/groupies are very well satisfied. Just when you think they can’t possibly have any more energy, they bust out into a face-melting guitar solo.

Despite the fact (or perhaps in addition to it) that these guys can rock, they are incredibly skilled at what they do. Colin MacDonald has an incredible voice. It’s warm, full, throaty, and he has amazing range. For an example of what I mean, check out a song called “Hopeless”. John-Angus MacDonald has killer guitar skills as well. He busted out all the great tricks: playing between the legs, playing behind the back, rolling around on the floor. He did everything but make it sit up and beg. Not to be neglected is Sean Dalton, who threw in a great 10-minute drum solo amidst strobe lighting.

Their older stuff is a bit more provincial, but their latest release has more mainstream appeal, as evinced by the first single from that album, So She’s Leaving. I seriously recommend checking these guys out.

As is my habit, I will also discuss the opening band. Boy, a Toronto band, was mediocre, had little stage presence, and got kicked out for bringing shots on the stage. Seeing them get booted from the hall was my favourite part of their show.

Songs to Check Out

- So She’s Leaving – Stray – Confessions – Hopeless ******* OMG LISTEN TO THIS SONG – Tired of Waiting – Fleeting Trust

I was blissfully sleeping, when the doorbell rang. I wake up and look at the clock, it was 11 am (I had slept at 6, so normal wake-up time was at 2). Cursing my luck, I stumble down the stairs, in my pajamas, still half-asleep. Wondering who could it be at this early hour (and still the doorbell was ringing), I open the door window (my door has a rather large window in its middle, so you don’t have to open the entire door) and I see this Albanian dude, about 40 years old, looking at me.

“Hello”, he says, with a distinctly Albanian accent. “What the fuck do you want”, I say, only to realise that I had thought of it, and not actually said it, so I go “yes?”. “I would like to know how much my Christmas bonus should be”, he says. I look at him for a few seconds while I try to figure out if I’m still dreaming, when I decide that no, I could never make this stuff up.

“What?” I ask. “I would like to know how much my Christmas bonus should be”, he repeats. “Yes, I heard that, I don’t know how much it should be” I say. Really, what do I look like, an accountant? That did not seem to stop him, though.

“They said I had to go to the 2nd floor to ask”, he says, pointing at the internal stairway in my house, which was visible from the door. “Maybe I should go up there?”
“Oh like hell you’re going up there”, I think, but wanting to maintain the already high level of the conversation, I say “no”.
“I want to know how much my Christmas bonus should be, can you help me?”
At this point a thought crosses my mind. “Noone can be this stupid”, I think. “It’s something else he wants. He probably wants to stab me and rob my house. Why did he do this at 11 am? Why not 11 pm?”. I also realised at that point that the key was on the door (on the inside, but easily reachable) and that I didn’t have my knife with me, so I could only defend myself with melee combat if he decided to pull any tricks.

I look at him suspiciously.

He looks at me stupidly.

“Is there a superlisor (sic) here?”
“A what?”
“A superlisor.”
“No, there’s noone here.”

Seriously. You ring a doorbell, someone in their pajamas that obviously just woke up answers, you look inside, it looks like a house, with tables, couches, a kitchen, the works. How the hell could it have a supervisor?

“So you can’t tell me how much my Christmas bonus is?”
“No, sorry.”
“I have been working for six months, how much should I get?”
“I can’t help you, sorry.” (= Who gives a fuck?!)
“Oh, okay, bye.”
“Bye.”

At this point he leaves, but I watch him from the window blinds. He walks down the stairs and talks to my neighbour who was downstairs. I hear him say “No, the NEXT street.” My neighbour had told him to ask at 2nd floor of the insurance office which is on the next road, and this retard came up to my house.

I wish I was making this stuff up.

A recent critical look at the child’s prayer (you know, the really morbid bedtime prayer that comes from the days when the plague could kill you overnight) sparked my thoughts about what other things we are teaching our children. Is it any wonder they are so messed up when we teach them such BIZARRE shit from an early age? For your consideration…

A Porocrom Look at Nursery Rhymes

The old woman and the shoe

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread,
Whipped them all soundly and sent them to bed.

While I am all for teaching our children the realities of the world in which we live, is it really necessary to expose them to the brutality of single motherhood, child abuse and neglect at such a tender age? This woman needs a social worker or something. Getting past the deplorable state of her children, let’s ask a practical question, shall we? Why the heck does she live in a shoe? Are we to believe that this woman and all her children live in an ordinary sneaker (or perhaps a disarded loafer, M. Goose is not specific)? Or perhaps it is, as many fanciful illustrations would have us think, they live together in a humongous boot? If that is the case, where on Earth would one find such a dwelling? Are we to then conclude that a moster shoe is available for a more moderate price than an ordinary house? I want to meet the Real Estate Agent who managed to trick this dumb bitch into putting a down payment on a place like this (“Aluminum siding? That’s so passe! This place has STEEL TOES!”) Also, here’s some advice for you lady. Keep your damn legs closed.

Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Classical illustration depicts Mr. Dumpty as an egg. I am confused by this, as nowhere in the rhyme does it specify what manner of person/thing this Humpty character is (For those of you who are going to be parents, please don’t give your kids rhyming names. It isn’t cute, it’s frightening). As far as we know, Humpty could have been a 500-piece puzzle, some furniture from Ikea, or a delicious 7-bean casserole. Here’s the second head-scratcher. Why would you ask the king’s horses to put him back together? Horses, as my research indicates, do not have thumbs. It is, therefore, very difficult for them to manipulate broken pieces of anything in such a way as to reconstruct them. They should have called in all the king’s chickens, since they are the egg experts. Also, why not give the women a go? Women are often quite skilled at putting things back together! At least they could have brought sewing kits or something. While I am not a blind optimist, is it really necessary to introduce children to a suicidal egg? I think not…

Peter Pumpkin Eater

Peter Peter, pumpkin eater
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her.
He put her in a pumpkin shell,
And there he kept her, very well.

How sad that we make light of battered wife syndrome. This woman is clearly not able to flee her husband, who is so poor that he must eat pumpkins and nothing else. Then again, maybe Mrs. Peter was a constant source of nagging: “Why can’t our relationship be more like the Spratts? They are always doing things betwixt the both of them!” Clearly he is concerned with her welfare, since he keeps her “very well”. This rhyme is probably designed to desensitize children to the way their parents like to beat the fuck out of each other all the time.

Jack and Jill

Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down, and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.

This one is so messed up that it doesn’t even rhyme. What are we saying to our children? “It’s okay to be lazy if you can’t find a rhyme for water.” Anyway, no mention of what they need the water for, nor is there any mention of why anyone in their right mind would construct a well on top of a hill, since water is below the ground. It seems that this rhyme is designed to put women in their place, since Jill dutifully “tumbles after” Jack, despite the fact that she could have just stayed at the top of the hill and maybe called an ambulance for Jack… or at least scooped his brains back into his head.

Jack be Nimble

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

This rhyme is clearly written by a pirate, since it employs the infinitive form of the verb ‘to be’ (as pirates are wont to do: “Yarr, I be a pirate!”). There’s only one question to be asked about this very short rhyme: Why? Why not just walk around it? We will never know, as Jack went on to die falling down that hill. I guess he wasn’t quite as nimble as this verse would have us believe.

So, Mother Goose, we can only assume that in between penning rhymes you were grooming parasites from underneath your feathers and taking wicked bong hits. As a society, it is encumbant upon us to analyze carefully what message we are sending to our children, lest they grow up to produce unoriginal and unfunny websites…

As you have probably suspected, we at Porocrom are devoted to bringing you reviews of only the absolute best products. Today we are reviewing a product whose idea is as ingenious as its implementation useful. We present Stadium Pal. Do you love wetting yourself in public, but hate the hassle of getting arrested and shunned? Then this product is for you.

Stadium Pal is one of those products conceived when a brain-dead person accidentally replaced their IV with LSD because they smoked too much weed. It is basically a bag with a long tube attached to it. You strap the bag to your leg, and you wrap the tube against your peepee and then when you piss, it goes into the bag. When the bag is full it hopefully bursts, killing you and spraying everyone in a 100-feet radius in piss and blood, so that your relatives will write on your tombstone “He died and people got pissed”.

Stadium Pal is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen, and this is coming from a guy with a comedy blog. I mean, what is so gripping that you could not possibly take your eyes off to go piss? Want to watch a game? It only lasts an hour or so, and they have plenty of breaks inbetween. Not to mention that you can, you know, go before or after it? I guess that “people not in a vegetative state” is not one of Stadium Pal’s target groups.

Another excuse for using this abomination that I hear frequently is “on long car trips”. This is actually quite valid, if you have to drive for eight hours straight and stay above 50 mph because otherwise the entire bus will blow up, killing everyone in it. Otherwise, you can take a break and use a restroom or a sufficiently big bush.

On top of being useless, Stadium Pal costs $29.95, which is $35 more than I am willing to pay for a bag and a tube, so we have included instructions on how to create your own Stadium Pal. You will need:

1. Three plastic straws.
2. Two pieces of string, 1ft long each.
3. A plastic bag.

Take the straws and insert one into the other, like you used to do when you were a kid and your parents would leave you alone in the coffeehouse to go gamble their foodstamps away. Take the plastic bag, tie it to your leg using the pieces of string and tie the top with what is left of the top piece of string. Insert the one end of the long straw you created in the bag and the other in your penis (this might hurt a little or render you impotent, don’t worry) and you’re all set.

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We have, nevertheless, spotted a glaring omission on the part of BioRelief (the makers of Stadium Pal), and that is that there is nothing available if you want to take a dump while watching “the game”. So, we now present to you this amazing new product, the Ass Pal. Simply insert the tube (which is coloured red for easy access) in your ass and you are ready to go (pun intended)! The plastic bag can be changed when it is full and it is very inexpensive. We have also done some research, and have arrived to the conclusion that by combining the Stadium Pal with the Ass Pal, you can sit on your couch and not get up for a whopping 81 days!

Stay tuned for more reviews of brilliant products!

As many of you know, but some of you don’t, I am proudly a student at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Canada. I am enrolled in the faculty of Applied Health Sciences which is, as you may have guessed, a sciences program. Most of my friends are in AHS as well, just by virtue of the fact that it is a very small faculty and we tend to clump together for protection against our natural predators: Engineers. Anyway, some of us occasionally venture outside our faculty to take courses that are not offered within. It is in this manner that I found myself sitting in a psychology lecture. I was looking forward to getting a chance to learn some things of personal, if not professional interest to me. The prof began and I was all set for a fast-paced class with lots of new ideas to think over…

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Then the hands went up.

If you have never had the extreme pleasure of taking a psych course at university, DON’T. You would be better off spending your time reading an Archie comic and putting a live wolverine in your underwear. This method roughly approximates the intellectual challenge and unbelievable pain of sitting in a class with a collective IQ of “no”. The problem isn’t that the material is difficult to follow. Quite the contrary; much of it is rather intuitive. The problem lies in the fact that the students who have made psychology their chosen academic focus are too bloody stupid to follow a simple lecture. Faced with new information, their brains shut down and their hands shoot up. Most of the time, the questions are of a normal variety: asking for further specifics and whatnot. However, they quickly progress to the land of the idiotic. Questions like “Would a person who is blind in one eye be able to eat an entire pie, or would they only eat half of it?” (I really wish I was making this question up. To the moron who asked this, I pose a question in reply: WHO EATS A WHOLE PIE?”).

Once precedent for moronic questions is set, it’s like a dam bursts and all the idiocy flows out unabated. “If you keep breathing in, will your chest get bigger?” “Has anyone seen my pants?” “Uuuuuuungha?” They are the kind of questions you would expect an 8 year-old to ask in that tender age before they learn that not all questions need to be asked or answered. Despite the fact that information has never been more readily available and people are supposedly more educated now than ever before, it seems as though these arts students have an innate fear of learning things on their own.

I can’t lay all the blame on the knuckle-draggers in the seats however. If I were a professor (and I’m sure everyone is glad I’m not) I would have a “question quota”. Once the number of moronic questions has exceeded the quota, I would just refuse to answer any more. Not so for psych profs however. They treat even the most thoughtless question as though it was of utmost importance. As a result, fully half of the class time is wasted answering people’s dubious inquiries, while the sciences students languish (if you are thinking of taking a psych course, bring a newspaper or a GameBoy).

But at least it all stays confined to the 3 hours of class per week, right? Wrong, bucko. Thanks to the magic of the internet, anyone in the class is capable of sending e-mail notices to everyone enrolled in the course. This is when arts students reveal themselves to be far beyond the bounds of ordinary idiocy. If you’re stupid, so be it. There are many stupid people in the world. However, it takes a special class of idiot to advertise to an entire classroom of people that you are completely incapable of independent thought. As we approached the first term test, I received about 10 e-mails asking Dubya-quality questions about the exam. Keep in mind, all these questions had already been answered in class several times. It is also possible to send these questions to JUST the prof or the TAs. Not so for these geniuses: the whole class gets a bulletin. Because it’s not enough that only some people know how brain-damaged you are, EVERYONE must know!

The worst part of it all is that there is no escape from these people if you are at all interested in the field of psychology. I can’t speak for other universities, but I would imagine that this problem is endemic in the field of psychology… which makes me fearful for the future. These are the people who are going to be building our rocket ships and doing our heart transplants…

Oh wait, they’re ARTS students… never mind then. Let’s just hope the guy pumping the gas doesn’t put up his hand to ask a question and spill gas all over my BMW.