Up All Night

Insomniac

Green Day

Reprise 1995

I haven’t always been a booster of Green Day.  I owned a copy of Dookie back in the day and wasn’t much of a fan.  It had some catchy songs and received huge MTV and radio airplay but it never really captured me.  Over of the years, I gained more exposure to them.  I think Warning is a good album.  American Idiot was one of the biggest albums of 2004.  Today, I am reviewing Insomniac.

In my eyes, Insomniac plays like a concept album.  It tells the story of a young, well off young man and his decline into meth addiction and his eventual clean up.  The first two tracks introduce the subject: a well-to-do loner living of his family’s money.  In Brain Stew, he tries speed for the first time and after that, he slides into drug abuse, panhandling and any number of self-destructive activities.  He crawls out of the gutter and ends the album as an empty suit.  The album is peppered with full on bombast, catchy melodies and fist throwing break-downs.  Creepy musical introductions light a fuse for musical dynamite.

Insomniac doesn’t boast the commercial success or sound of Dookie, Nimrod or American Idiot.  There isn’t a radio friendly song like Basket Case, Time of Your Life or Boulevard of Broken Dreams.  Insomniac challenges listeners to follow along as it lays the building blocks for other great Green Day albums – most notably Warning’s musical range and American Idiot’s deeper exploration of a concept album.  More than that, this album feels like a reaction against the financial windfall of Dookie.  Insomniac drops the snotty, wise-ass attitude in favor of something darker.  Call it a minor key.  Call it hard-boiled cynicism.  Call it the real world.  Whatever it is, this album captures it.

This is one of my favorite albums.  It has considerable replay value for me.  I would recommend it to anyone.  Today, gentle reader, I recommend it to you.

Insomniac by Green Day: 4.8 out of 5 skulls.

My ability to write about music without writing about the music: 4 of 5 skulls

Incoming Freshmen Welcomed by Overflowing Toilet Humor

As many of you loyal readers know, I have no problem laying out critiques of my own work. After all, every single posting that I have published on this fledgling web log has received a rating. With that in mind, I would like to take a look at the 2008 Southwest Minnesota State University Orientation Sketch Show.

Every year, we in the Drama Club write and perform a comedy show for the incoming crop of freshmen. This year was no different. We performed twice this weekend with varying results. On Saturday night, the crowd was standing room only and very responsive to our act. Almost all of our scripted sketches got big laughs and the improvised sections of the show went fairly smoothly. The show started with some very racy content, it was accepted, and we cruised through the night on a wave of laughter and fart jokes. Life was good.

Then we got to Sunday night. Unfortunately, there was not a lot of word put on the street about our second performance, so the crowd was pretty sparse. It didn't help that there were "mandatory" house meetings in all the dorms on campus, but that's neither here nor there. Our performance wasn't great. The sketches were designed to be big and broad. That doesn't really work with an audience of 15. I will say, though, that some of the improvs were much stronger on Sunday, so it wasn't a total loss.

What it comes down to is that we had an up performance and a down performance. Not everything went perfectly on Saturday, and not everything was a mess on Sunday. In the end, though, we got laughs, good times were had by most, and we found a few new people who were interested in joining our little club.

2008 Sketch Show, Saturday: 4.5 out of 5 skulls
2008 Sketch Show, Sunday: 2 out of 5 skulls
This Post: 2 out of 5 skulls

Results with an Eggy, Lilac-Tinged Feel

Well, my beloved, witty, urbane and most probably bored interwebizens, five of you have spoken and we have a tie! It seems that Louie the Lilac as played by Milton Berle and Vincent Price's Egghead are equally the most feared and beloved Batman villains. Good for them. The Otto Preminger Mr. Freeze put up a good fight, but his flirtation with victory was short-lived (much like his affair with Dorothy Dandridge!). Oh, well. At least he wasn't shut out like Roddy McDowell as Bookworm and Rudy Vallee's nuanced portrayal of Lord Marmaduke Ffogg.

For the next poll question, I thought I might do some cross promoting. The Jukebox Gyro and I have been kicking around a new Conversations piece about American Gladiators and I was wondering, who is your favorite Gladiator?

Batman Poll Question: 2.5 out of 5 skulls
This Post: 2.5 out of 5 skulls

A Madden-ing Experience

I'm just gonna come out and say it: Madden 09 sucks. Maybe it's right in the wheelhouses of many gamers throughout the world, but I just can't get behind it. It doesn't work for me and I'll tell you why.

I have played many entries in the twenty year history of the Madden NFL series over the course of my life. I've played it on Genesis, SNES, Dreamcast, Playstation, X-Box, Playstation 2, and X-Box 360. I always liked it well enough, but it wasn't until Madden '03 that I really got into the game. That was when my friends introduced me to Franchise Mode. We would build our teams up, draft players, make silly one-sided trades with the computer controlled teams and have a good time. We would then simulate the regular season and only play against each other if we met in the playoffs. At that point, we would play each other head to head. This is important to my opinion of the new game, so let me repeat it. We would play each other head to head. In the same room. Often sitting on the same couch. Right next to each other. You can't really do that anymore. You see, for the last couple of years the people at EA Sports have changed the play selection menus from their classic, tried and true format.

It used to be that, when selecting a play, a gamer would first pick the formation in which his team would line up. At that point, three different plays would come up on the screen. Each play would be labeled with a different button that, when pressed, would select that play. This way, the person that you were playing against would have only a limited idea of what your tiny, make-believe football men were going to do. The system wasn't broken, but EA Sports decided to fix it anyway. Now, a gamer must highlight the play he or she wishes to implement, leaving no questions in the mind of an opponent who happens to be playing on the same console.

Now, I understand that there is a huge on-line community for this game. An if you're playing on-line, the play selection system is fine. But I don't play on-line. I can't share a pizza and a beer with someone I'm playing against that lives in Denver. That isn't fun to me. Apparently, though, that's the only kind of fun that Madden '09 wants me to have.

Madden NFL '09: 1.5 out of 5 skulls
This Post: 3 out of 5 skulls