WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Numismaticism Update: 2013 Marathon Fundraising Edition

Congressional Republican economy terrorists have been holding the country hostage for a while now—Sequester! Fiscal Cliff! Debt Ceiling! Meet All Our Crazypants Demands or We’ll Blame Obama!—and people who don’t enjoy negotiating with terrorists have been looking for a way around dealing with them. How can we keep paying our bills if there’s no money in the bank? Well, one obvious way would be to print some more money.

Technically, the Government can’t print more money, but the Federal Reserve can. (They are not the same thing and if you don’t know this, that is because you are not a nutbucket conspiracy theorist like me. Most normal people do not know how the Fed works.) BUT: Back in 2011, a Constitutional law professor at Yale started talking about an idea to take advantage of the one way in which the Government can mint more money: commemorative coins! The Secretary of the Treasury is allowed (31 USC § 5112!) to strike platinum coins in any denomination. So all the Secretary of the Treasury has to do is to mint two one-trillion-dollar platinum coins, deposit them with the Federal Reserve, and hey presto! It’s all good. (And go to hell, Repubican economy terrorists.)

The trillion-dollar-coin idea started being talked up again a couple months ago, as the Sequester approached, and it was even endorsed by some Celebrity Economists, but in the end Jacob Lew was confirmed as the new Secretary of the Treasury and even if he tried to issue The Coin, no one can read his handwriting and the Treasury would probably just issue a couple of platinum Slinkys instead.

Still, I do believe we could apply the trillion-dollar-coin principle to raising money to support WFMU.  When Former Cohost Jay and I decided to produce our own Thunk Tank currency (the Bieb, the official currency of Iceland!) we discovered that it is illegal for anyone but the Government to issue specie (coins), but anyone can issue paper money. (So we did.) Why should we continue with the annual Marathon and the Record Fair and the Secret Off-Air October fundraiser and the Superstorm Sandy Wrecked the Station Special Appeal and Station Manager Ken in a Lawn Chair Attached to Weather Balloons, going back to the Listeners for their support again and again, just because we’re a Listener-Supported station? (And God bless the Listeners, they have been fantastic!)

All Station Manager Ken has to do is issue a 1-milion Bieb note (which trades at a rate of 1 Bieb to 1 US dollar), deposit the note in the WFMU bank account, and then pay all our bills! (Or just deposit 10,000 100-Bieb notes, because I think there are plenty of them lying around the station from Thunk Tank’s overproduced Marathon premiums.) Assuming the bank that has the WFMU bank account will accept it for deposit, which maybe they will not.

Alas, the one- trillion-dollar coin is not to be. The main problem seems to have been that it would have called attention to the fact that our entire economy is based on the fiction of fiat currency and debt. So I will never be able to add the Biden Commemorative $1 trillion dubloon to my collection, and I also still have never got a Guam quarter, either, so what’s up with that? You can still use your Federal Reserve-issued currency to support WFMU, though, so go to wfmu.org and make your pledge now.

Thanks for reading my blogpost this time, and thanks for supporting WFMU.

 

 

Putin Summer Retrospective

As befits the future Savior of Humanity (or at least the Savior of Blonde Russian Gymnasts in the Duma), Vladimir Putin has been extremely busy this past summer. One of his major tasks has involved recruiting new members of the Putin Pals, his protective managerie of super-powered animal agents. Thunk Tank Cohost Jay and I often wondered why it was that the Putin Pals did not have any bird members, when their primary mission will be to defeat the insect forces of MANTIS. How is it that Putin would recruit a Were-Whale before he’d got even one bird? (Anuka, the Flying Donkey, does not count as a bird, because: Legs. Hooves. Hair. Mammal.) Naturally, the Leader was just waiting until the time was ripe, and this summer he finally judged time to be squooshy and soft enough to unveil his Craneforce. Dressing in the uniform of a Crane Obergruppenfuhrer—sort of a white hazmat jumpsuit with weird black goggles—Putin jumped aboard Craneforce One and led the baby cranes on skywriting maneuvers high in the sky above Moscow, where they wrote “Surrender, Pussy Riot!” in smoke, and also in Russian, not English. And Cyrillic. Cyrillic letters are really hard to make in smoke, but of course Putin enjoys the challenge.

Print Isn't Dead!

In connection with my little hoarding problem, I also have a bookstore problem. My New Year’s Resolution this year was to stay out of bookstores, and I have done so, unless you count Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal that I have pretty much stayed out of, except for drifting in … oh, not very many times at all. Hardly ever! And also, I haven’t bought any books there, except for a couple. But not really! Mostly, I just go in to look at the latest issue of The Believer to see whether there are any more articles by WFMU DJ Dave Mandl about WFMU DJ Kenny G., and so far there have not been. 

Posman Books does not have a terribly large selection of magazines anyway, not as large as any of the actual newsstands in Grand Central, so I’ve sort of lost track of What’s Going On In Magazines Today. Having been a magazine editor for a number of years, I still have a sad, schadenfreudish interest in the genre. So that’s why, when I got caught in the rain last Thursday down by Battery Park, I felt that it was all right for me to go into the big Barnes & Noble there to, you know, get a cup of coffee and look at some magazines; it was purely for research purposes, it wasn’t about buying books. Not at all.

Once inside, I got the very worst iced caffe latte I’ve ever had anywhere and began my investigation. Barnes & Noble has several shelves of magazines: How can there still be so many titles? Niche marketing, apparently. For instance, Glutes. Yes, Glutes, a “women’s fitness magazine” about making your butt look good. It turns out it’s not even a new magazine; Glutes has been around for years, apparently with the same headline on every cover, just changing the punctuation: “Your Best Butt Ever!” vs. “Your Best Butt … Ever.” Your best butt? Whatever. Check out Pole2Pole.

 

Okay, a magazine called Pole2Pole is about, what? Amundson, Scott, Shackleton …? No, it is a magazine about “the sport of pole fitness.” Pole fitness. Back in my day, it was just a sleazy way to supplement my college scholarship, but now it’s a sport. In fact, it is so very sportsy that there are several other magazines also devoted to pole fitness, such as Pole Spin and—my favorite—Vertical. And those are just the actual print periodicals; there are several other titles online.

A few years ago, I got a promotional copy of Garden and Gun, which I thought was pretty awesome: It’s like Martha Stewart with a Mossberg. It’s won a number of magazine-industry awards, and sells tons of advertising, but now I realize it is just the older, more aspirational cousin of Gun Girl and a slew of magazines featuring photos of women in bikinis holding assault rifles.

So the good news is, Print isn’t dead! It’s just turning into a Hooters franchise.

The Love Song of Kim Jong Un (UPDATE!)

Kim Jong Un has a girlfriend! Or maybe a wife! Or maybe a girlfriend who is somebody else’s wife! No one at Thunk Tank Central (or anywhere else) is really sure. But last weekend he was seen in public with a young woman. Who was she?

Korea Joongang Daily says that South Korean intelligence has identified her as Hyon Song-wol, former lead singer for the Bochonbo Electronic Music Band. Hot gossip: KJU might have had an affair with her when he returned home from his Swiss boarding school. His father, Kim Jong Il, may have objected to the (still unconfirmed that it ever happened) relationship and separated the two. Song-wol might have married an army officer! She might have had a baby! But whose baby was it?

 If, you know, there even was a baby. Or if the woman in the photos with Kim Jong Un isn’t just his sister, which it might be. Whatever! Here’s the video for Hyon Song-wol’s #1 super hit from 2005, Excellent Horse-Like Woman!

 

 

Are You A Badass?

As regular listeners know, we here at Thunk Tank are committed to saluting the badasses and feats of badassery that make this world a more interesting place to live. Some listeners may be confused, however, as to what exactly makes an individual or a particular accomplishment badass. In order to clarify the criteria by which we evaluate candidates for This Week in Badassery, and to help listeners determine whether they themselves are badass, we’ve created this simple quiz. Just answers these six questions and total your score at the end to determine whether or not you are a badass.

 

SEE YOU IN HEALTH: The Thunk Tank guide to the 5 most likely things that will kill you to death

Half of Thunk Tank almost died last week, which made us realize that we owe it to you, the WFMU Listener, to alert you to the Five Most Likely Things That Will Kill You (this week). Consider it a public service. (You’re welcome.)

1. All-Drug-Resistant TB. Okay, it’s not bad enough that you keep taking antibiotics for your headcold (Das viral!) and using antibiotic soap to wash your crusty dishes, which caused multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis even in a young female ginger who is also a lawyer and lives in London (much to the surprise of the BBC). No, now your stupid antibiotic lip gloss has caused ALL-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, which is just in India now, but will be killing you sometime next month.

The Good Stuff: A Bill of Rights for Today's Busy Citizen

Hey there folks! I’m Morty the Mouse, and I’m here to introduce you to the brand new Bill of Rights! Your friends here in Washington realized that our Founding Fathers, as smart as they were, wrote the Constitution with some funny words that can be hard for regular folks like you and me to understand. So, in the spirit of projects like The Message—a version of the Bible written for hip youth—we decided to rewrite the Bill of Rights in language we can all enjoy. Now, just so you know, we didn’t change any of the meaning—no sir, this is exactly what the Founders meant to say—we just made it a little clearer. We hope you enjoy!

 

 

The Good Stuff: A Bill of Rights for Today’s Busy Citizen

1^st Amendment

Confusing Old Stuff:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Good Stuff:

Congress won’t make any religion the official religion of the US, but we all know that unofficially, Christianity is the official religion and political rhetoric and public celebrations will all reflect this. Everyone has the right to speak in non-terroristy, ways as long as the government can listen in, receive information from center-left and center-right news outlets, and gather in shopping plazas for commerce, or in free speech cages during brief state-approved and scheduled demonstrations. 

Robo-Clones Replace DJ's at NJ Radio Station

Just like Santa Claus, Thunk Tank cannot be everywhere at once, and so we do what Santa does—we hire some homeless men to dress up like Jay. But not anymore! Now Scientists and Experts in Japan have found a new answer to this age-old problem: the Robo-Clone.

We are not talking about 3-D–print dolls from the Clone Factory—Clone Factory dolls are so pre-tsunami! Plus, they’re small! They are not life-sized, unless you are only about a foot tall. Here, this video explains everything:

 

(You may want to fast-forward to see the Fat Guy’s tween harem get creeped out by the doll.)

There's nothing I can write that a man riding a flying aligator can't express better

 Seriously, I was trying to think of what I wanted to say this week, but this animated gif is more eloquent than I could ever be. We're halfway through the WFMU marathon now and I felt I should take this opportunity to talk about how great FMU is, and how lucky I feel to play my small role in this cultural pirate utopia, but, you know...this guy is flying through the air riding a goddamn alligator. An alligator of all things!

Update: Banda Banditos

After our post on Banda Music, Thunk Tank received an email from Listener Reeshard, directing us to a news story about the growing problem of California tuba raids. Banda relies on the tuba, and tubas cost, like, $2,000–$7,000 each. So thieves are breaking into high schools and stealing all the tubas and sousaphones from the band rooms, but leaving all the other brass instruments, the computers, electronics—they only want the tubas, because playing the tuba is cool. If, you know, you’re into banda.

Thunk Tank supports the music, but not the thievery. Look! You can make a perfectly serviceable tuba out of an empty plastic jug and some pvc piping and some other stuff I don’t really understand the Spanish words for:

 

 

All Your Holiday Belong to Us

As ThunkTank continues to inject itself into all pop culture like a prion from outer space, it was inevitable that we would begin to take over holidays. This Tuesday happens to be a holiday, a holiday in which you puny humans express your affections with heart-shaped pieces of flavored chalk imprinted with slogans—everything from PITCH WOO to FAX ME* And so we have created Thunk Tank Conversation Hearts; but, being Thunk Tank, ours are enormous: Eating one is like putting your entire fist into your mouth.

 

*actual examples

Thunk Tank's Monopoly Zodiac

As part of Thunk Tank’s bid to expand our global media empire, this week we’re moving into the lucrative world of daily horoscope readings. Every newspaper prints these things, people go online to read them, the Zodiac Killer is beloved by millions, it seems only natural that Thunk Tank should provide horoscope readings in order to attract more listeners. Thunk Tank being Thunk Tank, however, we have decided to forgo the traditional horoscopes provided by either Western or Eastern traditions, and instead provide our own system based on a person’s date of birth and a corresponding Monopoly game piece. And so, without further ado, we present:

The Thunk Tank Monopoly Zodiac 

The Music We Would Be Playing, if We Were Playing Music

Besides being WFMU’s first callerless call-in show, Thunk Tank rarely features music. Every week we go through the new CDs that have come into the station, and find a few we like, and bring them into the studio, and then don’t play them. If we were playing music, though, right now we would be playing a lot of banda, a style of brass-heavy oompah music from the Mexican state of Sinaloa—also home of the pointy boots!

 

But that's tribal music, not banda. Banda instrumentation includes accordions, tubas, sousaphones, slide trombones, clarinets, and a drum with no kick pedal and a manual hi-hat. Diligent viewing of Mun2 TV has convinced Bronwyn that banda songs are mostly about fat pizza delivery guys who get beautiful girls, and young busboys who get beautiful girls, and school janitors with beautiful janitress girlfriends who can’t stop looking at the high school girls.

more videos beneath the fold...

Pickle backs and saddle sores part 2: bucking strap glory

I had no idea how to ride a bull. None. I’m just a simple sandwich suit-wearing radio DJ from the small town of Brooklyn, and the big country ways of rodeo folk confuse me. But the bull rope was being adjusted around Viagra Thunder’s ribs and I had a job to do. I looked over at Applebuck, standing outside the bucking chute nervously chewing her hoof. She knew that her brazen behavior had gotten us into this mess, and the only way for us to get out of it was for me to…

Suddenly, I was up in the air, floating gently for an instant before falling towards the earth and crashing with only the foam padding of my chicken and Brie sandwich suit to cushion the violent impact. Viagra Thunder, that rotten bovine, had bucked me off to put a scare into me before we left the chute. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him laughing and then my head cracked against the hard arena floor, and everything went black.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself standing in a rodeo arena, but instead of bleachers surrounding the fence, rolling towards the horizon was an infinite prairie of billowing white clouds. “Bet you’re feeling a might confused, eh there buckaroo?” I turned towards the source of that gravy-smooth voice, and there, standing before me was rodeo legend Smokey Snyder dressed in the finest cowboy splendor and glowing faintly.

Entr’acte: The Rodeo Clown

 

So: Bullriding. You get on the bull in a chute, and the gate opens, and the bull comes out and bucks, and you stay on as long as you can, and then you fall off. Or, if you manage to stay on for eight (8!) seconds, then they blow a horn and you can jump off. And then what happens? You’re on the ground, in an enclosed area, with a pissed-off 2200-pound animal with big testicles, big horns, and also possibly ’roid rage. (There was a bull-doping steroids scandal in 2007.)  For your protection, they bring in the clowns.

Pickle backs and saddle sores

Applejack was drunk. Not hammered, but enough to be getting surly. We were sitting in some forgettable Irish pub near Penn Station and she was going on about how hard life in Equestria could be. In town for BroNYCon, the tough girl of the My Little Pony world had grown tired of signing autographs and had snuck away from her adoring fans to enjoy a drink. I had been sitting at the bar when she walked in, sat down next to me, and started chewing my ear off.

Empty shot glasses littered the bar in front of us, and Applejack’s breath reeked of brine from the dozen pickle backs she’d put away. “You ever seen Applebuck Season?” she asked me, her mane making a faint swishing noise as her head bobbed back and forth. “You think Stutterfly helped with that harvest? Always playing with her forest friends. You think that bitch Rarity is doing anything but combing her tail all day?”

She gulped down another shot of house whiskey and pointed her hoof at me for emphasis. “You think climbers are tough?” She gestured over to Madison Square Garden where the Professional Bull Riders event was going on. “You think those stupid cowboys over there are tough? Horseshit. Ponies are tough. Ponies are tougher than anyone,” and then she burped, vomiting a little bit in her mouth, and swallowing it back down.

Cyrillic Tiny-Voice Death Metal Techno

Sluggo sent me these, and that's all I know about 'em, except that they're amazing.

 

The City Formerly Known as Munising

We knew from the beginning that the marketing campaign was really going to make or break the whole project, so we had to choose our language very carefully. That meant “serf” and “indentured servant” were out immediately—too much historical baggage—and "licensee" and "lessee" were too legalistic, not enough implied fun. So we performed the Thunk Tank mind meld, and came up with the answer almost immediately: “Contestant!”

The word implied a sense of promise and great potential, but with no guarantees. Winners would succeed in a great meritocracy, while losers had no one to blame but themselves. “Citizen,” I mean, what a burden, what a dull stink of responsibility that has, but “contestant”… well, hot damn, a contestant gets a moment in the spotlight, the opportunity to vie for greatness. “Contestant” rhymes with “celebrity” and celebrities are sexy. “Congratulations! You’ve been selected to be a contestant on the town formerly known as Munising!” It was brilliant.

Rick Snyder has the name of a game show host and the face of a traveling vacuum cleaner salesman. He’s a businessman, a venture capitalist, and a self-described nerd. I actually don’t think he pushed through the Local Government and School District Fiscal Accountability Act as a salvo against Working Class America, or as a nefarious power grab for the oligarchy. I think he truly believes the gospel of corporate efficiency and—as nerds often do—confused a “rational” choice for a “good” choice, without really comprehending the inevitable consequences of his plan. Like many nerds, he’s also a sucker for flashy PowerPoint presentations, and like many corporate executives he’s a sucker for jargon-riddled, buzzword-referencing executive summaries, and this is where we saw our opening.

Michigan had budget problems, and thanks to the LGaSDFA Act, if the governor thought a town was almost broke, and local officials weren’t cooperating with the state to resolve the problems, good ol’ Rick could appoint a Financial Manager to step in and play Sim City with real people. Managers could default on bonds, ignore union demands, rearrange schools … hell, they could disincorporate and merge whole towns if they wanted! For obvious reasons, becoming Financial Managers seemed like a highly desirable position for us, and so we used some of Bronwyn’s connections to certain Olds to get an audience with the Rickster and explain how he was looking at a real crisitunity here.

Because Physical Wounds Heal

I felt like Ernie Anastos after he told the weatherman to "Keep fucking that chicken" during a live broadcast. Externally I had to just keep smiling through, while inside my mind was screaming that whatever madness had just passed my lips had the potential to devastate all that I held dear. And all I had said was, “Yes, sir.”

Rather than further contemplate this horror, however, I snapped a salute to Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, spun on my heels, and exited his tent into the smothering Afghani heat. Until now, I had barely seen the general, let alone spoken with him. All orders passed from Caldwell to Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, my CO, and then down to me. But it seemed that the general and the colonel weren’t seeing eye to eye lately, so Caldwell had sought me out as a potential ally in his private campaign.

"Operation Four Star," Holmes had derisively nicknamed it. Caldwell wanted to use our psyops team against visiting Congress members to prop up flagging support for the war. There was no threat Congress would move to actually end the occupation, but attention would shift back to Iraq, the boys in Baghdad would start getting all the headlines and funding increases, and the next thing you know our $20 billion-a-year air-conditioning budget would be slashed.

It'd take three or four years before Iraq would start feeling hopeless again, the press would start screaming about the great Taliban threat, and we would get our AC back. Nope, that wouldn't do at all; the generals, with their promotions depending on AfPak s continued prominence, were not going to lose this pissing contest, even if it meant some Senators needed a little light brainwashing. And I'd just agreed to help with the scrubbing.  

Of Benjamins and Biebs

Many Listener Blog Readers are familiar with Bronwyn C.’s longstanding fascination with numismaticism, especially the Ron Paul Dollar—the second most popular currency in the United States! But many don’t realize that the number one most popular currency, Federal Reserve notes, aren’t the only option. 

Briefly, the U.S. government does not issue money, the Federal Reserve Bank issues money, and the money is a “fiat currency,” which means it’s not backed by silver or gold, it’s backed by your delusional belief that it’s worth something. Section 411 of Title 12 of the United States Code provides that Federal Reserve notes “shall be redeemed in lawful money on demand at the Treasury Department of the United States, in the city of Washington, District of Columbia, or at any Federal Reserve bank”—but what is “lawful money”? Well, in this case, it’s debt. 

But you don’t have to use Federal Reserve notes if you don’t want to! You can use any of a number of alternative currencies, all of which are perfectly legal. If you’re in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, you can use the widely accepted local currency called BerkShares. Just look up “alternative currency” and you’ll find a lot of them, all perfectly legal—except, ha ha, the Ron Paul dollar, which was backed with actual precious metals and so the FBI raided the issuers’ office and everyone got indicted and now there has to be trial. 

NEVERTHELESS, in our quest to boldly violate the false dichotomy between jokes and serious shit, Thunk Tank is issuing Thunk Tank Notes just in time for the WFMU Marathon! Listeners will be able to exchange Federal Reserve notes for Thunk Tank notes 1:1. We intend to make the Bieb the second-most popular currency among WFMU Listeners, and we figure as long as we don’t issue coinage or claim to be legal tender, we probably won’t get indicted.