The Perfect Woman- Tom Ball&Kenny Sultan

The BluesBerries cover this song, but this is a video of the creators playing it live. I have no idea what Mammoth's Annual Festival of Beers and Bluesapalooza is but it sounds like a great place to be!

File Under "Who Knew?"

Bill Gates is ruthless, driven and competitive, says Paul Allen.

Brothers & Sisters We Got To Kick Out The Jams

There are probably more cover versions of Kick Out The Jams by MC5 than MC5 ever sold copies of and just about every one has a video on YouTube...

The original had the best hair, at the very least:



Rage Against the Machine does its thing to the song. And Henry Rollins has a suitably shouty version

Monster Magnet do a straight up cover, the riff really demands that you do it exactly like this, oddly it sounds almost exactly like the Xena version (I'm not ready to do my long Xena post yet -- possibly ever --, but this was a highlight of a particularly embarassing episode, Xena had already done a musical episode, one that rivals Buffy's Once More With Feeling, but Lyre Lyre got it wrong on multiple levels including having Xena rap...)

The Presidents of the United States of America do a vaguely nerdy cover and Jeff Buckley and Evan Dando do suitably singer-songwriter covers. The Buckley version being notable for his tiny freak out at someone snapping pics at the beginning.

It's just a really cracking bit of rock'n'roll. Isn't that enough, Miss McKenzie?

Trying To Tie Everything Together

Starting like a "Mothermother" the Roots get Ice Cube to revisit one of his earliest hits, Straight Outta Compton. Part of me hopes that they then showed the trailer for "Are We There Yet?" just to compare and contrast. But let's not distract too much from this blast of pure hip-hop:


Interestingly, in her cover of Straight Outta Compton, Nina Gordon doesn't shy away from any of the profanity:


You sort of want her to add some to Phil Collins' One More Night, though:

I Kissed A Girl by Jill Sobule

When the Katy Perry song of the same title came out, I initially hoped it was a cover of this. It wasn't Perry seems to have gone to other things (appearing in lads mags as far as I can tell) while Jill Sobule did get to tour with Warren Zevon and Billy Bragg (though not at the same time, which would have been awesome).

There were a number of parodies of Perry's song on YouTube when it came out including the memorably (for me) vulgar "I Did[1] Your Mum". I still think it's a pity nobody did this to Sobule's song as it should have been a YouTube hit, especially the bridge where you can imagine the parodist getting more and more excited as they sing:

I did your Mum
It was so sweet
She was into doing me
I did your Mum
It won't change the world
But I'm so glad...
... I did your Mum


[1] Not the actual word. Not that I'm squeamish about swear words, I just decided to be coy here because I'm about to repeat the word a lot and I don't want to tip any censors.

DBT! DBT!

Drive-by Truckers "Drag the Lake Charlie" Later.....with Jools Holland


Also from Later... is a video of Birthday Boy which I can't embed for some reason. Two good performances, though. There are some that'd tell you Later... has gone on well past its sell-by-date, but while it's still getting good bands and good performances I particularly care that it's getting a but moudly round the edges.

Never Gonna Change


An actual, sort of, video from the Truckers to support their Dirty South Tour video. This is back when they still had Jason Isbell in the band and he handles the vocals here. Isbell wrote one of my all time favourite Truckers songs called Outfit, and this is a pretty good version:



And, finally, an oddity. Patterson Hood and friends (which seems to be all the trucker 'cept Mike Cooley) doing a cover of Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight. I really wanted to like this, but it's a bit of a mess. I guess you just had to be there.

Sexy Lesbians Asshole Bleaching Petula Clark Up The Arse

So, as you can probably tell from the date stamps on the posts, it has been a while. Blogger hasn't changed much, except now it's offering its own stats page. Nothing too earth shattering although one of the stats is for "all time" (back as far as March 2010, I believe) search keywords. It really sums up my posting history:

Search Keywords

1. roadzters 41
2. assholebleaching 8
3. paul herzberg steyr 7
4. sexy lesbians 7
5. cricket club steyr 5
6. looking for the next best thing meaning 5
7. muddy funster 4
8. petula clark up the arse 4
9. pherzb.blogspot.com 4
10. asshole bleaching 3

I think I may have my perfect blog post title now, the redunancy of "asshole bleaching up the arse" being particularly perfect. The rest of the blog can't possibly live up to it...

Ummm Hmmm!

My blog is seventh when you search for best looking thongs on Yahoo.

This makes me happy.

Yippie Yie Ay

This comes from the seemingly one-off Cowboy Rumba album. I was hoping that there'd be a video for "Feelin' No Pain" one of the greatest ever drinking songs, but Ghost Riders is a fun blast of Merengue.

Beyond Good & Evil HD for X-Box 360

I played the original BG&E on my old X-Box back when it came out. The original, as you may remember, came out to good reviews and low sales. I enjoyed it at the time, feeling it was well paced and I especially liked how the bigger world would slip you into mini-games without you realising it. The characters were well written and the ecological theme neatly integrated.

Playing it again eight years leter, in this new HD version, nothing has really changed. The higher resolution graphics and improved textures only serve to make it just how you remember it. The eco-theme seems more prescient and the fact the the lead character is an adult woman with normal-sized breasts makes you wonder why there aren't more like her in video games. Did BG&E's relative financial failure give games companies an excuse to pump up breasts in games?

It's a good solid ten hours of gaming, assuming you collect every pearl and creature and beat every race (probably a bit shorter if your racing skills aren't as rusty as mine). It has oodles of character and the main characters are memorable. Andrea, who wasn't playing (but occassionally gave out sage advice -- "maybe you should drive faster"), really, really wanted Pey'j to live. It parcels out the gameplay in very satisfying ways. The world gradually gets larger and you keep getting extra abilities that you immediately have a reason to try out. Just as you think you've seen it all you are dropped in to a fun, explosion filled, race across the roof tops (my favourite set-piece, a real smile inducer).

It isn't perfect. The lips never quite match what is said. The story requires everyone to be just a little bit dense. The camera, while mostly set-up appropriately, sometimes just gets bloody minded. And the story just ends setting lots up for a trilogy that hasn't happened, yet.

It's a tenner. If you haven't played it yet, you should. If you have played it, play it again in the hopes it will give Ubisoft the incentive to finish part 2.

He Looks Young There

Warren Zevon and Jackson Browne do Mohammed's Radio in 1976. My first reaction was to how young Zevon looks, but in 1976 I'd have looked five...

Chain Factor

When I've got a little time on my hands and nothing to do, I tend to play Drop7 on my phone. It's addictive and only takes a couple of minutes to play a game. It's sort of a cross between Tetris and Connect4 and easier to play than describe.

It's based on an older online game called Chain Factor which is just as good if not quite as portable.

Next

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band covering Next on the Old Grey Whistle Test. I'm not sure why I haven't looked for this before because I like SAHB and Next is one of my very favourite songs. This is a great performance.

Jacques Brel's original, Au Suivant, isn't too shabby either, though the subtitles are a little dodgy according to the comments (useful comments on YouTube being pretty amazing in itself).

A Little Bit Kinky

Hayes Carll - She Left Me For Jesus

So, As I Was Saying...

You know, Facebook Statuses are really no substitute for a blog post.

I've missed, what, seven months of links everybody else already has and the occassional rant, but my loyal audience of spammers has, at the very least, kept my comments lively. Don't check for that now, though. I've deleted the great bulk of them.

So, Blog posts. As I understand it, the original blog idea was that it was a log of where the poster had been on the internet, a web-log if you will, though some took he mechanics of that idea and made more "diary" styled blogs possible. This very blog has multiple examples of both styles. It seems odd to me, but the link list web-log seems to have become something of a business model across the whole Internet.

Whereas before you might go to your favourite blogger and find a link that might pique your interest, you can now go to sites whose whole raison d'etre is publishing the same mildly amusing dozen links every day as about a thousand other sites. For example Cracked has a page called Linkstorm which seems to aggregate a few of these pages and skims off the more amusing ones, showing some sort of editorial judgement, if only minimal. Just about all of the links on that page go to pages that have links to other pages that have very similar lists of content.

If you haven't yet read about the "Top 10 Most Controversial Video Games", don't worry you'll get the chance to read it, or one very much like it, pretty soon.

That all said, I will be posting my "Short Shorts" posts as regularly as before and hope to get some ranting in even more shortly.