I was recently shown an image of NBA finals runner-up LeBron James lounging out on a regal throne, flanked on either side by a trio of actual lions. The Heat forward was the picture of royalty in most respects, appearing about as smug as the supposed greatest-living-basketball-player has every right to look. While  LeBron’s recent actions and overall demeanor have at times thrown me into a fit of rage, there’s just no disputing the fact that the dude has a knack for sniffin’ out a killer photo shoot… even if his headband has been creeping ever-northward since the first time he stepped out on NBA hardwood (you have to get your shots in were you can.).

Anyway, this specific image immediately sent me into a downward spiral of sports-themed nostalgia and reminiscence. I was reminded of a particular vintage poster featuring  former Atlanta Falcons Guard Bill Fralic, where he’s pictured perched atop a similar looking throne, set in between a pair of ritzy looking hound dawgs. I started thinking of the days when superstar athletes didn’t bat an eye at the notion of dressing up in a wacky, potentially demeaning, ensemble, all in the name of selling a few posters. If you were born at any point throughout the 80′s I’m sure you know the type of promo shot I’m referring to. In an age when Adobe Photoshop was just a geeky pipe-dream, pro’s had to really go for it when the studio flashbulbs started to burst.

After firing up the Google Image Search, I was quickly immersed into the bizarre world of old school sports merch. The shots I tracked down suggested that professional league PR departments were on some laid back tip throughout most previous decades. So many of theses posters either featured an athlete wielding a gun, or implied that the athlete in question was prone to gunning down foes out on their respective playing surface.

Check out the size of that piece in the Eric Davis shot! There’s no way this type of shit would fly in the current buttoned up social climate we now reside in, and it’s kind of unfortunate. What I wouldn’t pay for a Plaxico Burress poster featuring the dude in his finest sweat pants, propped up in front of a stripper pole, toting a couple of hand guns.

You can check out more of these posters, in all their absurd glory, in a slide show posted by Coed Magazine. Not only do most of the photos feature an athlete dressed in something border-line humiliating, but also usually present whole bunches of lame props in the background. These props only tangentially correlate to the actual athlete in question, but over time, became a real linchpin in the completion of one of these photo shoots. Just look at the heap of crap that populates the supposed back yard of Bob “Mad Dawg” Golic. I would have personally liked the props master here to include some refference to Golic’s time spent acting on Saved By The Bell: The College Years, but I suppose you can’t have it all.

Sadly, in recent times, this outrageous brand of poster has gone the way of the giant-headed athletic caricature t-shirt. Which is to say, these things just aren’t produced anymore. In this less-is-more, Terry Richardson-dominated photographic climate, it seems that most folks want to fix their gaze on a smartly dressed superstar set in front of a stark backdrop. History tends to repeat itself, however, so lately I’ve been counting down the days untill Blake Griffin get’s photographed straddling a motorcycle, dressed like the Terminator. I can truly picture it now.

It’s been said that one could actually hear the collective Hurrah! let out by music heads world wide when it was announced that Rhino would be releasing The Stooges Complete Funhouse Sessions to the public. Although I was thrilled to obtain this thing , the wave of genuine excitement I initially felt soon subsided as I began to realize that the box itself was comprised of an absurd 7 discs, while the original record only contained a mere 7 tunes. Now I fancy myself as an avid Iggy Pop fan, and a Stooges completest to some extent, but the task of listening to this thing cover-to-cover would be considered herculean by most stretches of the imagination. Before embarking on a particularly long voyage by train, however, I decided I’d dedicate a large portion of the trip to listening to this monster, while attempting to keep my delicate psyche from splintering along the way.

Upon taking in a large chunk of the tunes while gliding along the rails, I realized a number of things about Ann Arbor’s favorite sons (this distinction may actually, in all likelihood, belong to Bob Seger, but just bear with me). For starters, while I hesitate to refer to any one band member as the consummate professional, they were all certainly workmanlike in their endeavor. I was actually a little disappointed with the banal nature of the between-song-dialogue featured on the discs, as well as the general lack of hijinks the box had to offer up. If you’ve ever taken witness to an interview with Iggy, or had the pleasure of reading the Legs McNeil penned Please Kill Me, you’re probably aware that these cats liked to get a little loose, and weren’t afraid to hit the bottle or, more tragically, the needle. Throughout these sessions though, the guys keep it pretty buttoned up, and seem to take everything out on their instruments, with varying degrees of aggression. For better or worse, the mania most people associate with The Stooges is generally only displayed here in small intra-song bursts.

That being said, this thing really should be considered essential listening if you’re a fan of the band’s musical output. The ultra-inspired playing found throughout these outtakes more than make up for the audio blips and tape pops you’re bound to encounter along the way. I think WFMU auteur Tom Scharpling put it best, when he referred to the music found here as “the prefect axis of being out of control, and being in total control”. At some point you begin to forget that you’ve been listening to the same tune for the past 35 minutes, and begin to revel in the minutia of a particular vocal take or the varying tempos each various cut has to offer… It’s also kind of funny when somebody fucks up, and they have to start the whole song over again.

Finally, I’d like to quickly highlight the mind boggling ability Iggy possesses to conjure up things to yell at his band-mates just prior to them playing a solo on their respective instrument. Never has this specific skill been better on display than on the seven discs comprising these Funhouse sessions. I knew he was good, but I never knew he was this good. With the precision of a fighter pilot, Pop has the foresight to swoop in the split-second before Ron Asheton begins shredding, shout something relatively stupid, and make me giggle. My favorite examples of this comes when he simply exclaims HORNS! before a sax solo on an early cut of 1970. Be sure to keep track of these moments if you happen to be playing along at home!

So know I guess you know what Nag Nag Nag Balls are… sort of? Walter Parenton of I Am the Fourth went and chopped together this twisted trip down memory lane for our upcoming Nagballs release.

I especially love that he incorporated the Viral Victor/Harold Hacker graphic Johnny Sampson did for us last season.

Oooooh, noooooooooooo! Beloved seven-time world champion wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage, AKA Randall Mario Poffo (what an adorable last name for a professional tough guy!), died this morning at only 58 years old. He had a heart attack behind the wheel and crashed his car around 10 AM earlier today.

Macho Man spent the ’80s and ’90s winning championship after championship, and delivering some of wrestling’s greatest outfits and pre-match interviews ever. And then of course there were his terrifying advertisements for Slim Jims. I swear I used to hear “ART THOU BORED?!?” in my nightmares.

After retiring from wrestling, he spent his final years releasing a classic rap album, Be a Man, complete with a Hulk Hogan diss track, and marrying his longtime girlfriend, Lynn Payne, who was with him in the car but sustained only minor injuries. Pour one out for the man whose elbow drops and trademark snarling inspired tons of our grade-school classmates to send one another to the nurse’s office. After the jump take in a few of Macho Man’s choicest interview clips. Rest easy, Macho Man. There will never be another like you.

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Shitty title. But I don’t even care. I’m so stoked right now – and I don’t even care about sports! Very accidentally apropos with the upcoming Superbowl situation. No plan or forethought intended at all.

And really, what I have to say here is just BARELY associated with football. Huddles. Huddles were these little cutesy cartoonified versions of NFL mascots. In REALLY high-quality. And with maximized nostalgia hit. Yay.

But, really, I’m most excited that these little fuckers are real. These dudes spun me out for about a week. I was up on CONFERENCE CALLS hijacking polycoms like a motherfucker and straight speakerphoning fools about these things.

“You know…like Football Precious Moments.” “Muppet Babies meets the NFL.” “You don’t remember those?” I searched for mini NFL. Vintage Cartoon Mascots. 80s NFL Novelty Mascots. And you know what? These seem to all be weird Google passphrases for ‘random merchandise with a weird smattering of mainstream-ish, softcore porn.’ Feel free to try it.

So now, the big question: Does anybody else remember these? I would totally want a set of the pins or a set of cards. Or shit…even just a set of hi-res jpeg scans. I think the style and execution (of the drawings, at least) is just so awesome.

Xavier Roberts meets Rainbow Brite. Or something like that. A few more examples and shitty images here. Cyco Simon Huddle. Bring that shit on, pls. Kthxbyenow.

Sup time travelers! Nerduo, composed of Mike Essl and Robb Irrgang, are out with a batch of new t-shirts for all of you ubernerds out there! You may remember their first t-shirt The Battle, which took a jab at one of my favorite 80s cartoon series’, and now with their new shirts they are taking it back again for a classic 80s trilogy!

As you may or may not know, Essl and I run the newly reinstated Mr. T And Me together. Despite his knowledge of all things T, the man still has a lot of time and brain power to devote to other sorts of nerddom, much of which is expressed through Nerduo.

There isn’t enough Back to the Future fandom out on the streets. Everyone loves that shit, but I should be seeing DeLorean tattoos on the reg. It’s also definitely high time that the gauntlet is thrown on the battle between Back to the Future and Star Wars. Y’all know that would be an epic battle that would span both space AND time.

“Jigga What?” and “My Trilogy” are now available for pre-sale on their site 1.21 Jiggawatts! Currently the pre-sale price is only $19.55! Get em for that good price now before you’re outta time!

Been a minute since I’ve thrown the Special Report card your way, hasn’t it? All that really means is that I’ve stopped digging around in my attic while trying to make room for junk that wasn’t previously already in my attic. That’s how this thing here rolls. On big, easy to see, wagon wheels.

I did unearth a Hateball artifact this week, however, and it’s just weird enough that I figured I’d share it with you. Somehow, it had been shelved in with my zines and small-format savers, which is weird, because I made it. It’s mine…special to nobody but me myself and Doughboy. How it got stacked with all that ‘real’ stuff is one of the Earth’s greatest mysteries.

First, maybe a little bit of bg. ‘BG’ stands for background. Now you know. A brief history, as it were.

Starting a business is hard. Take that baseline difficulty and sort of jump up the scale when you add in that you’re trying to start a business because you got laid off from your tech contract. Add in any sort of ‘bubble’ reference, and, well. Yeah. My business partner and I started our little entity in 2000 and for the first year or two we were….how you say…bored as hell; we didn’t really have any clients yet, and we spent our days sitting in our dining room in front of giant, blinding, sterilizing CRT monitors trying to find something useful to do.

Now, take that super arid soil of boredom and add in some buddies who are amazingly creative designers. We had just such buddies, whom we happened to share a house with. These buddies were twin brothers, and they worked at rival design firms. What you start to get with this combination is a little itsy bitsy shoot of hilariously weird, intensively cryptic jpegs that got tossed around, back and forth, all day, the point of which was to out-weird and out-funny one another until it was time to quit work and start drinking beer. Such was life, and I lived in the garage.

And don’t misoverstand my meaning: I was completely outclassed in this competition. These twins could weird the shit out of anybody without lifting a finger. True absurdists. They had us (all) chasing photos of Lionel Richie for a solid year. How he became the focus of our endeavors, I’ll never know. It was…strange. If they had just happened to be evil, we’d all be wearing the same sneakers and barking at the moon on boxing day.

Anyway. Somewhere in the midst of all this, I got the idea to make them a music mix and an accompanying CD booklet for Christmas one year. As I remember, I had a total blast putting the project together, but, out of embarrassment, I never ended up giving either the music or the book to them. I mean, the book is goofy, and I remember being so ridiculously inept at papercraft that I slapped the thing together—quite clumsily!—late one night at a Kinko’s. I guess that SORT OF explains the phone cord binding…right? But I regret not giving it to them. Seems like a missed opportunity.

Long story long, I recently found this book. And it’s finding spurred me to try and dig up the accompanying music. It is apparently long gone. All I can tell you is that I mixed it together in FUCKING ADOBE PREMIER and sort of folded in little soundbites of the audio version of ‘Brief History of Time’ as read by Hawking himself. It was…pretty funny.

I did, however, find all the jpegs, complete with my horrible sit-down comedy haikus (Cometry? Poemedy?), and so, since I can’t help but heap humiliation upon myself, here they are, for you, to see.

EDIT! Stop the presses! Extry! I actually found the merged MP3 of this ‘album’, and I have posted it here. For your enjoyment. If you’d like, feel free to download it and play along with the following discourse. Availability is availability.

Download Hateball’s Brief History of Time Vol. 1

Complete tracklisting, as well as a page-by-page photohaikubooklet and accompanying commentary after the jump.

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I saw this posted at Quietus earlier today and found it pretty funny. It’s two really nerdy dudes (the one on the right considerably awkward and nerdier than the other) reviewing the Fall’s latest album, Your Future, Our Clutter, which we reviewed last year. Long story short is they hate it with one calling it the polar opposite of Justin Bieber and the other saying “It’s Like Artistic and Random For No Reason.”

Anyway, the reason I found it so funny is that I went to High School with kids just like this (I’m sure you did too) who’s basis of rock mostly centered around the “Classic” variety with a little Pearl Jam thrown in. As I started getting into Sonic Youth and then Post-Punk and god knows what else, I remember music discussions with them would always end up sounding exactly like this. They also don’t get the new Girl Talk album either “Why so much Rap? Why not mashing-up two rock songs!?” Lots of fun to be had at their YouTube channel.

About a month ago, one of the Bloglin posters posted (whole milk I believe) about his recent findings in the Avant-Garde Black Metal/Doom label known as Video Horror Show. To sum up his post, Video Horror Show released an album set to clips from old occult horror movies and only released as a VHS tape. Within minutes of reading this post I had ordered myself one of 50 hand numbered tapes, and was eagerly awaiting its arrival.

One small problem stood in my way. I didn’t own a VCR and really hadn’t for quite some time. Having recently just parted ways with 99% of my DVD collection in favor of a more pirated future, I felt a bit uneasy about venturing back in time for the sole reason of owning a cool evil black metal album on VHS tape.

I threw all that aside, and ventured to my local Salvation Army, which as luck would have it, had three VCRs availble for only five bucks each! After a couple quick tests I was ready to pay and leave…. except I realized that I was at a Salvation Army and they MUST have a VHS section. Low and behold, it was fucking STOCKED with gold.

My first two purchases were The Best of Wrestlemania and Eddie Murphy’s Raw. Raw is one of my all time favorites so it was great to be able to bring it home and watch it in its true 1980’s state of all things wrong. The Wrestlemania tape was that of legends. I had no idea that the first Wrestlemania was as badass as it was. The main event match being Rowdy Roddy Pipper and Paul Orndorff vs. Hulk Hogan and Mr. T! I had no idea Mr. T had ever even wrestled. And if that wasn’t enough, Muhammad Ali was the guest referee. Seriously one of the best matches I have ever seen.

This basically started off my new addiction which has become finding the best of the worst movies on VHS tape. I know my collection isn’t as good as The Vidiot’s stash of old porno tapes but I think its the start of something pointless. I’m sure I’ll look back on this idea later on and laugh, for it’s been quite the hilarious venture so far.

So far I think owning Buffalo 66 on VHS has become the crown jewel of my small collection. Good old Vincent Gallo. Christina Ricci too.. amiright?? Until Next time.

I’m in my thirties, son. I’ve got mad old-man humor coursing through my veins. My shit is so sarcastic I can hardly contain my excitement. (for my real dogs: My shit is so sarcastic I fuckin’ TALK in purple type, WHAT!) My sense of irony is so big it’s like a dollar of irony. Say it with me: this is who you’re dealing with.

So you can straight feel me (yo) when I tell you that it makes a motherfucker WAY giggle to hear fools talking about ‘casual gaming’ and ‘social gaming’ like it’s new. Like it’s rad.

Newsflash: casual, social gaming has been around since the early ’80s. It’s called Arcade games. How are you gonna creep up behind a girl who’s got the same haircut as dude from Wargames and get her to spray soda in your mustache when you’re standing at home waving a dildo around at your TV? You aint. Not social.

A casual gaming experience is epitomized by the arcade-style shooter. And the arcade-style shooter thrived—throve—when I was at the stage of my life that focused on frozen yogurt, half-naked pictures of Cindy Crawford, and turning my meager allowance into as many quarters as I could and then snorting them up my fingers.

So here it is. My ode to that. Behold: My Top 5 Favorite Arcade-style Shooters.

0) Preamble: Life Force Boss Battles (1986) [Konami]

I’m sitting in my bedroom, next to my sleeping wife, and I can SEE—fucking SEE!!!!—my unborn child moving around in her. It’s, like, something. I can FEEL myself changing from Granny Smith to Red Delicious, if you can dig that. IT–my boy—has me thinking about Life Force, and how I’m gonna be the boss, and so here. A Life Force Boss Battle rundown. I STARTED this sentence as an explanation of why I haven’t listened to this douchebag at full volume so if he starts talking about Satan or Halliburton or something I apologize.

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1) R-Type (1987) [IREM]

If I remember correctly, this game started a lot. Not only did the weapons system and the different ways you could use your ‘option’ sort of revolutionize the whole idea of the shooter, I think it was at about this point when things started to go really fucking bonkers with these games. You didn’t just have patterned sorties of bad dudes (you like that faux military talk?) coming at you in sequence. All hell was breaking loose. Way loose.

—–

2) Viewpoint (1992) [SNK]

This is not only one of my favorite shooters, it’s one of my favorite games of all time. It’s just so perfect in it’s little perspective shift and the small but challenging puzzles it throws your way. Every time I play games on my Wii I check the store for this game, but it’s still not there to my knowledge. It’s also one of a very few NEO GEO games that has never been fully supported in MAME. Cherish every frame you get to play of this…it’s original board/cart only at this point.

3) UN Squadron (1989) [Capcom]

There’s a point in this game where you’re flying over some weird forest fortress and just—while fighting all of the flying enemies, of course—carpet bombing the shit out of it. You side-scroll your way across a few miles and then all of a sudden the gameplay goes on autopilot and your plane makes this super-boss 180-degree turn and you start flying back the way you came while the shit gets even crazier.

Sounds really dumb and whatever to me right now, but I remember this phenomenon totally blowing my fucking mind. I would have eaten dollars and shit tokens down this thing’s money-hole if it asked me to.

—–

4) Vapor Trail: Hyper Offence Formation (1989) [Data East]

This is one of those games that has a ‘rockin’ soundtrack coupled with some super shitty, Bad Dudes-style voice synth. When you die your pilot shouts ‘I can’t hold it!’ as you go down in flames. I always really liked the way the scenery/landscape was set up…the different ‘level’s of isometric freeways and shit that the tanks drive around on always seemed cool.

I though that there were some pretty crazy bosses in this game, too, but this one in the video doesn’t seem all that tough.

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5) Legendary Wings (1986) [Capcom]

I’m pretty sure I was terrible at this game, because honestly, I have NO recollection of the adventure/platforming part of this game that this video is showing. I loved this game as much as I did because of the scenery stuff…the weird statues and sculptures that look up at you as you pass them? What? It’s like that part of Fellowship of the Ring when they’re floating down the river and pass the big giant king statues….that sort of stuff blows my mind bigtime. Note to reader: big weird shit in the far-background blows Hateball’s mind bigtime.

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