"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Death from Above 1979, "Romantic Rights"

Song: "Romantic Rights" by the once-disbanded, soon-to-reunite-at-Coachella Canadian duo Death from Above 1979
Released: 2004
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: Dig that scratchy opening guitar riff. The opening title theme and bumper music for the Aziz Ansari/Rob Huebel/Paul Scheer MTV show Human Giant is my favorite theme tune for a sketch comedy show since Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet's instrumental "Having an Average Weekend" on The Kids in the Hall (Heavy D's second theme for In Living Color wasn't too bad either).

From 2007 to 2008, Human Giant gave us delightful moments like a sex tape in which Will Arnett says he gets turned on by abortions, a biopic about post-9/11 Bush starring a lisping preschooler as "Lil' Bush" ("Deeth colorth don't run!") and an Indian American sketch comic who managed to be funny without relying on minstrel-y, MetroPCS Tech & Talk commercial-style shtick. But the greatest moment from the Human Giant quartet (the fourth and largely off-screen member is segment director Jason Woliner) has to be when Ansari, Huebel and Scheer took over as MTV hosts for 24 hours, brought to the MTV studios musicians they enjoy but TRL and The Hills viewers wouldn't have cared for (like Tapes 'n Tapes and Ted Leo) and were given free rein to air on the channel whatever music videos or old MTV shows they wanted to see. Their hijinks during the 24-hour live telecast made the long-irrelevant channel temporarily watchable again.

After the MTV show ended due to the stars' commitments to other projects, the Human Giant cast members haven't been doing so well. Ansari is now starring in the great ensemble show Parks and Recreation and Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer's upcoming 30 Minutes or Less with Jesse Eisenberg, Danny McBride and Nick Swardson, a film Ansari has called "Heat with two really dumb dudes." Huebel is a cast member on Adult Swim's hilarious Childrens Hospital and has snagged a role as George Clooney's best friend in Alexander Payne's next movie The Descendants. In addition to co-hosting How Did This Get Made?, an amusing podcast in which he and his friends take a crap on crappy movies like Burlesque and Old Dogs, Scheer is starring in both FX's The League and Adult Swim's upcoming Childrens Hospital spinoff NTSF:SD:SUV and got the chance to work in close proximity to Kelly Brook's uncovered boobs in Piranha.

Catchin' Rec

Last March, the Parks and Recreation opening titles got Return of the Jedi-ized by a Parks and Rec fan. Now someone else has redone the titles in a big way. As part of promoting tonight's return of the much-missed Parks and Rec (it feels like it's been gone for ages--the extended absence was mostly due to star Amy Poehler's pregnancy), cast member Aziz Ansari has dropped an amusing remix.



The music in the Parks and Rec cast's CollegeHumor video is an actual hip-hop track from last March that sampled Gaby Moreno and Vincent Jones' great little Parks and Rec opening title theme ("Hampden Parks" by e-dubble).

My beef

Scrubs was one of my favorite shows for its first few seasons on NBC. You gotta love a show that gave us an episode like the tokenism-mocking "My Fifteen Minutes" or "My Screw Up" and had the balls to pull off 916-CALL-TURK (when I dialed up that number, I got Bill Lawrence himself and then during another call, "Nervous Guy"). During its first season on ABC (which actually produced Scrubs since its 2001 debut on NBC and was so pleased with its ratings last year that it ordered another season), Scrubs experienced a creative resurgence. Denise (Eliza Coupe), a.k.a. "Jo" (because her butchiness reminded J.D. of Jo from The Facts of Life), is a great addition to the show.

While I'm somewhat glad to see the slightly rebooted Scrubs back on the air, I wish the show delayed J.D.'s return. "My Finale" was such a perfect farewell to Zach Braff and J.D. that seeing Braff immediately again as a lead (but not the lead due to the emphasis on the new medical school setting) undermines that episode. I wouldn't have minded a Scrubs (or as I like to call it, AfterSCRUBS) with Donald Faison as the lead because he's such a funny presence as Turk and because that would have slightly fixed my major problem with AfterSCRUBS so far: the lack of diversity.


I always enjoyed seeing the likes of Charles Rahi Chun, Lela Lee and a pre-Heroes Masi Oka pop up on Scrubs. Last season, Sacred Heart had three Indian interns. That was especially cool to see. I know Aziz Ansari is a busy man (and Tom on Parks and Recreation is a far more interesting douchey character than Ed), but they couldn't bring back Sunny, the Indian girl who wasn't afraid of the Janitor and made out with Jo to mock J.D. and Turk's guy love? I liked her despite her eternal perkiness. The Sacred Heart med school is all-white now? Sacred Heart Hospital wasn't this white. Yeah, I know there were Asian extras at the school, but c'mon, man.

And after all these years of medical shows, I have yet to see a Filipino nurse or doctor as a regular (the Filipina receptionist from Elliott Gould's E/R--"Stay back of the white line!"--doesn't count). We fucking run Kaiser, so why the hell are we missing from these shows?

"You happy now, bitch?": 100 great quotes from The Wire

This sweet 10-minute montage of classic and uncensored (and therefore, NSFW) lines from all five seasons of my favorite TV series of all time is strictly for Wire fans only. Everyone else should skip this montage because it makes no sense without prior viewing of the episodes the clips were culled from, and it contains spoilers.

I wish the montage included a clip from Bunny's speech to the troops during "All Due Respect" ("There's never been a paper bag for drugs. Until now."), but it does include one of my favorite exchanges in the entire series--Omar pwns the Barksdale crew's slimy lawyer while being cross-examined by him in court. The scene boils down the series' primary theme of broken institutions so well in that terse manner that was such a trademark of The Wire:

Levy: You are amoral, are you not? You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade. You're stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off...

Omar: Just like you, mang.

Levy: ... the culture of drugs... Excuse me? What?

Omar: I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It's all in the game though, right?

Reason to Dig Aziz Ansari #2: Earlier this year, he amusingly pretended to tweet to (or retweet) characters from The Wire as if they were on Twitter.

[Via Entertainment Weekly]

"The Best of Jimmy J. Aquino on Twitter," Part 1

In March, I gave up resisting Twitter and launched a page there to write any blog posts that are only two or three sentences long. I didn't like Twitter at first, but I've adjusted to it, and now I think it's a more enjoyable and appealing microblogging/social networking site than the cluttered and less stripped-down Facebook.

I've found Twitter's 140-character limit to be a great way to test out my humor writing and be better at brevity. On Facebook, members have somehow discovered ways to bypass the character limit on their status updates, which has resulted in two things: 1) a lot of users writing updates that are longer than the Iliad, which kills the point of a microblog, and 2) me glancing briefly at those long-winded updates and wanting to log out of Facebook as fast as I can.

However, Twitter has a few downsides as well. Too many Twitterers have used the site to write some of the most vapid and boring microblogs I've ever come across (which resulted in Lewis Black uttering on Attack of the Show one of my favorite quotes about vapid-sounding Twitterers, "I'm not that interested in my life! What kind of ego do you have to have to think other people are interested?... If you're walking around telling people what you're doing, then guess what, you're not really doing it, are you? You're describing it!"). Instead of tweeting nonstop about every single activity in my life, I've preferred to focus most of my tweets on either the Fistful of Soundtracks radio station, movies and shows I've watched, links I want people to check out or links to the posts I write here at afistfulofsoundtracks.blogspot.com.

But the biggest downside of Twitter for me is that unlike Blogger or WordPress, Twitter doesn't automatically create archives of your older tweets, making it difficult to access older tweets that either you or someone else posted. If you want to access an older tweet without repeatedly clicking on the "more" link at the bottom of the page, you have to have previously copied and pasted the tweet's URL somewhere on your computer (like on Notepad) so that you can copy and paste that URL into your browser.

Because of the lack of an archive section on my Twitter page, here's a compilation of the tweets from my page that have received replies or have been retweeted (Twitter slang for being quoted), starting with my very first tweet.

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Dammit. I give up. I'm on Twitter now though I'm not feelin' the concept. I'm joining only b/c writing 140-ch. posts on Blogger seems lame.
12:59 PM Mar 14th from web

Awesome. My first word on Twitter was "Dammit," which, in the Cosby household, means "Russell."
12:59 PM Mar 14th from web

You know who does the best dammits on TV? Kiefer. Not since DeForest Kelley has someone taken dammiting to a whole 'nother level.
1:00 PM Mar 14th from web


@pfunn I see that dumb new name and I think, "Shouldn't it be pronounced 'sy-fee,' as in the Syufy [sy-yoo-fee] movie theater chain?"
1:31 PM Mar 16th from web in reply to pfunn

Rotten Tomatoes Show on @current is the anti-Movie Mob. Their webcam reviews come from intelligent folks, not annoying attention whores.
11:15 AM Mar 20th from web

I prefer Savage Steve Holland (Better Off Dead) over John Hughes b/c SSH's '80s comedies aren't as racist as Hughes'--and they're weirder.
11:37 AM Mar 20th from web

Savage Steve Holland's How I Got Into College is on Fox Movie Channel right now. Damn, tanktop-clad Tom Kenny is paler than @jimgaffigan.
11:38 AM Mar 20th from web

Is it me or do some Twitterers sound like Norm MacDonald as Larry King reading his USA Today News & Views column? http://tinyurl.com/d2m79h
4:08 PM Mar 21st from web

How nice. An earthquake just woke me up.
10:46 AM Mar 30th from web

Dammit, I can't get that silly Lady Gaga "this beat is sick" refrain out of my head ever since I first heard it on #Chuck last week.
1:30 AM Apr 11th from web


@gcdb She's the creation of a gay mad scientist who needed a new icon to worship b/c Madonna and Dona Versace are getting too old & creepy.
8:34 AM Apr 11th from web in reply to gcdb


@gcdb I bet every Canadian right now wants to bitchslap Billy Bob Thornton just like how Kurt Russell slaps around BBT in that movie.
7:56 PM Apr 11th from web in reply to gcdb

There needs to be an Asian American comedians' version of MST3K or Cinematic Titanic or #twitflixing (like the HGers' skewering of Crank 2).
4:08 AM Apr 17th from web

Why are Asian Americans always so serious and humorless and tweedy when they write essays or posts about racist pieces of shit like Crank 2?
4:13 AM Apr 17th from web

We Asian Americans need to take a cue from MST or HG or Paul Mooney and try a comic approach to ripping to shreds the Crank 2s of the world.
4:18 AM Apr 17th from web

@ALBaroza I want to do a live show in which an AA comic & I do snarky running com. on a racist flick. A RiffTrax-ish site might be dope too.
11:28 AM Apr 17th from web in reply to ALBaroza

"Why don't you make like a bass player and be inaudible?"--Metalocalypse. I've posted my all-time favorite basslines on @LivingSocial.
9:15 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 5. Jamiroquai, "Space Cowboy (Stoned Again Mix)"--the ultimate #420 anthem. Bassist: Stuart Zender.
9:18 AM Apr 20th from web


Basslines: 4. Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson's Barney Miller theme. Bassist: Jim Hughart. Rarely does a Jew on TV get a theme this funky.
9:20 AM Apr 20th from web

Basslines: 3. Freddie Hubbard, "Red Clay." Bassist: Ron Carter. ATCQ fans know this bassline from "Sucka N," which sampled a cover of "RC."
9:24 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 2. Slave, "Just a Touch of Love." Bassist: Mark Adams. Sampled by De La Soul ("Keepin' the Faith") and Das EFX ("Shine").
9:27 AM Apr 20th from web

Dopest basslines: 1. The Smiths, "This Charming Man." Bassist: Andy Rourke. His bass work is the coolest part of the chune.
9:30 AM Apr 20th from web


I can never hear "Ready to Go" by Republica again without thinking of Dr. Girlfriend.
4:33 PM Apr 20th from web

To be continued.