There is little doubt that the great diversity of styles and techniques of bowlers from countries enjoying test match status has helped to shape the history of [the sport]. With the recent world-wide implementation of professional coaching schemes, which generally teach only one, or perhaps two optimal ways…, bowling could be in danger of losing its technical diversity. Are we therefore on the verge of a new era in which the art of bowling is irretrievably lost? Possibly! However, as discussed below, the biomechanical principles underlying the bowling technique reveal some interesting new facts.

Unfortunately (for my purposes), that quote is about the wrong kind of bowling.

Anybody who’s seen me bowl knows how bad I am, even if I am among the few people I know who’s been to the bowling museum and hall of fame. Seeing these videos makes me tremendously thankful that nobody’s had a camera around when I’ve been throwing gutter balls down the lanes.

video, bowling, funny, embarrassing

Will, Cliff (both above), and I recorded this song in one take in late 1999. Though, calling it a “take” is overstating it. We were beyond silly drunk and lacked any talent for the task, but we had a mic in front of us, a guitar, and a willingness to open our mouths and let something — anything — fly out.

It wasn’t until Will said “This song is called Nukerator” that we knew what we were supposed to be singing about. We’d never sketched any of it out, or even discussed it. This was truly stream of consciousness, so as bad as it is, there’s also something endearing about it (well, at least to us).

Putting together the pieces from that night, we named our ad-hoc band “More Equipment Than Talent.” We’ve tried since to repeat the feat — the ingredients seemed easy enough — but we’ve had little success. Infighting, artistic differences, and a reasonable interest in raising the quality of our work have limited our efforts, but when this song appeared out of the blue the other day while iTunes was on random, I knew it was time to share.

Note: while listening to it last again night to get the lyrics, I realized there are a few lines about school violence that may be offensive to some today. The context, I hope, gives it the correct meaning.

Lyrics:

Will: This song is called Nukerator.

Cliff: No it’s not.

Cliff: What’s with you and f-major 7?

Casey: This is a song about a microwavable instant cook world. We live in this world, this over-abled world.

Casey: We got Cheez Whiz, we’ve got tacos, we got salsa, we got snack cakes, we got pizza feets. We’ve got everything we want.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: And it goes in the microwave and we eat it in five minutes. Cook it on 75% power, just throw it in the nukerator, just cook it now.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Got pasteurized processed cheese spread.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: I love my bagel bites. My meatless breakfast sandwiches; seven minutes at 75% power

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Microwavable hamburgers, spaghetti, and meatballs.

Cliff: It’s meaningless.

Casey: Microwaveable, inflatable girlfriend.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: A Solitary, confined sort-of-life between the refrigerator, and the microwave, and the Walmart. The Super Walmart with the superstore. The food products, the pasteurized processed cheese spread. the stuff I eat from the microwave after five minutes.

Cliff: It’s meaningless. It’s meaningless

Will: Nukerator. We’re nukrawavable. Nukerator.

Casey: Microwave, my cell phone, my pager. It’s my modern world and I love it.

Cliff: We find it only makes us fat.

Casey: My microwave fries the dynabites, and the cell phone fries my head. And I talk about it all day long. Meaningless

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: The average conversation on a cell phone goes like this: Hello, I’m here, I’ll be there later, no, I’m going there next.

Cliff: It’s a world of excess.

Casey: Meanwhile, driving my SUV, I drive through the school house, drive down all the kids, drive down the one with the gun who was gonna kill them all because he couldn’t stand it.

Cliff: Hello, I’m helping your environment. What can I do next?

Casey: I didn’t even realize it because I was on my phone with my counselor, who was fixing my hair. I didn’t understand it. My microwave was broken and my cheeze couldn’t be warmed. Just five minutes at 75% power.

Cliff: I hold no responsibility myself. I only put the responsibility on the head of my counselor. She has it all for herself. I don’t what I’m trying to say, but I don’t have any responsibility today. Will dropped his pick, it’s not his fault. He takes it in his hands. I’ll grab it for him…

Casey: I live in a microwavable, able world. A world of isolation and communication. False pretense, false friendships.

Cliff: Long hair is European, short hair is American.

At this point, Will and I looked at eachother and realized it’d gone too far. Sorry to all that we realized it so late.

drunkmusic, betrunkmusik, music, free mp3s, mp3, more equipment than talent, audio, song, silly, embarrassing, bad, nuke, microwave song, nukerator, drunk, alcohol induced poetry, social commentary, nuclear

Without contradicting the moral weight of social software post from last week, let’s take a moment to look at three stories from Arstechnica about MySpace and others: online video leads to teen arrests, shooting rampage avoided due to MySpace posting, and Google + Facebook + alcohol = trouble.

These are the stories we’ve come to expect: teen does or post the results of something [stupid|illegal|dangerous] in [MySpace|Facebook|some other online place] and gets caught. The point here is that the (meatspace) community’s existing means of enforcement worked, and perhaps worked better, in these new electronic forums.

Our youth’s new Wild West may have instead turned out to be an Orwellian nightmare that no kid can escape from.

It’s bad enough, anyway, that Nate Anderson had to give some advice to the young’ns:

What can you do to keep yourself out the crosshairs? The obvious first step is to internalize the idea that no section of the Internet is your private playground, and to keep your mouth shut in public forums about information you would rather the rest of the world did not know. Beyond that, though, it can be difficult to eliminate traces of stupidity online. Good luck getting Google to remove all links to that embarrassing office karaoke video that comes up first when you search your name. It ain’t gonna happen. The moral of the story is: don’t expect privacy on the Internet and you won’t be disappointed.

embarrassing, facebook, moral responsibility, myspace, online policing, playground, privacy, public forums, social internet, social software, youth