Hello all: In our efforts to provide an ever-better site for you, the crew here at SAR INC has decided to make another web-page revamp. However, this time the site change isn’t cosmetic, it’s content based. If you are a long time follower you probably remember our first content change. Initially the site was just metal music interviews, but in an effort to broaden our horizons we started writing about anything we wanted with no real continuity (aside from authorship) between posts.

Well, after punching the numbers, DJ suggested that we may have made too big of a jump. Apparently moving from very specific to infinitely undefined didn’t help us establish the regular foundation of readers we’ve been looking for.

It makes sense if you give it even a half-second of thought. When I do my rounds of the internet I make my stops in very categorized ways. E-mail, social networking site, indie-music blog, celebrity gossip news, fake-news, entertainment site….etc.

So how do you categorize SmartassRadio?

Well, it’s a frankenstein monster of things DJ and I find hilarious and/or noteworthy. Which would be fine, if DJ and I were an established brand of humor. But alas, outside of our group of friends, we are not.

So, in order to make the site more directed, legitimate and (hopefully) visited, we’ve decided to say that from now on: we’re a vegetable-porn music-based website.

It’s not a tremendous change really…I’d say we’re already 75% music-based, but from now on you won’t be seeing any more posts like, “What Angelina Jolie Would Be Thinking If She Drove By Me While I Was Running One Of My Intermittent Three Mile Runs”

(I mean let’s be honest, if Angelina Jolie drove by me while I was running one of my intermittent three mile runs she would probably just think, “Wow that guy looks terrific, I’d like to give him a massage” and then she’d just start thinking of something else.)

Of course, this doesn’t mean we’ll be abandoning humor (if that’s what you want to call this). We’re just saying, “HEY, all these posts are about music.” Connections. Full circle.

So, that’s the announcement as announced by me. Why am I announcing it? Why don’t I just make the change without informing the readers explicitly?

Well, that’s the SAR difference. We put ourselves on the same level as our delicious readers. Does Billboard make these kind of personal announcements? No, Billboard.com is written by a robot. Would Pitchfork be this gracious? No, they would just make fun of you for not realizing that they are just called Pitchfork now instead of Pitchfork Media. Would some snobby-blog be this up-front? No, they’d just post some shitty mp3s, provide some tour dates, give a lousy review of a lousy album and call it a day.

So, that’s it. You might be seeing some more reoccurring segments now (I’m planning one called “Rewinding with Roy”) and of course the podcast and interviews will be going strong!

As always dear reader, comment if you have any suggestions, because our real goal is to become a pleasant stop on your internet hit parade.  And to continue rocking, but that has never been a problem.

Many of you may not know this, but I’m a pretty well-read guy. I’m not implying I’ve read any particular library of classic books – I’ve made it a point to never read a single Charles Dickens book no matter how many I was assigned throughout high school, I have a particular disdain for Ernest Hemmingway and, frankly James Joyce can suck my hog (I assume based solely on his name that he’s of the homosexual persuasion). However, I do read the news every day. The real news. The New York Times – not Metro NY, The Post, anything posted on CNN or any of that other silly hogwash. (Morris Day and) The Motherfucking Time(s). That shit is the MAD notes!

Anyway, I was reading an article yesterday about Michael Jackson’s memorial (Michael Jackson: The Memorial, rather) and I came to a phrase that was totally worthy of a tweet, however Twitter tells me “Arrow_on_red” and to “watch a video,” which I never do.  So, unable to share this hilarity in my normal manner for quips of such insignificance, I decided to let it stir for an entire day and be evacuated from my body in a long form post. My original tweet will be followed by my elaboration:

yesterday the ny times referred to the michael jackson memorial as an ‘orgy of mourning’ http://bit.ly/ZSqkY sounds like an awful goth band

(Note how I refuse to use proper punctuation for my tweets.)

Indeed, Alessandra Stanley decided to equate the ramblings of a bunch of aging stars and the sobbing of a child to a sex act involving three or more people. For this, I cannot fault her. I’m almost positive it’s the first time I’ve ever laughed while reading the Times – unfortunately for me, I was drinking hot coffee and ended up with second degree burns inside my nose, but that’s neither here nor there. What I can fault her for, is the exact words she used. An orgy of mourning carries a ton of possible connotations. For one, had her left pinky slipped and hit the shift key, she would have ended up with an “orgy of Mourning,” conjuring images of retired Miami Heat basketball star Alonzo Mourning having all kinds of kinky sex with other people with the last name Mourning.

Pimp.

As my tweet above will inform you, though, this was not my initial reaction. At first, I thought it sounded like a bad high school “goth” band. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what the term goth actually means. In middle school I know we used to call anyone who listened to KoRn goth. I don’t think I used it in high school, but if I did, I’m relatively certain it was in reference to the fat asses who watched Anime (and by association Hentai). In college, I realized both the definitions were wrong as I became more entrenched in what I know as “metal” and listened to idiot girls refer to other idiot girls who happened to be wearing a black t-shirt as goth.

Now, I tend to associate it with darker rock acts and (at the risk of upsetting either a frigheningly fat or skinny mongrel of an outcast) some more feminine black metal acts and people who still insist on wearing trench coats and ponytails. (Ghaal, I’m looking directly at you.) With that, let me set the scene for how Orgy of Mourning came to be:

Greg Schmidt (or Devastatorious as he liked to be called, not realizing how retarded and off-base it was) was a skinny lad, aged 15. At one time, he was very much into N*SYNC, but never told anyone. As a direct result, he was driven head first by the denial of his own homosexuality to black metal. First it was just once in a while, when he was bored of his Metallica CDs, but with the advent of high speed Internet and P2P networks, he found he needed to own and know everything about every band ever, which brought him to his current position in life – trolling message boards, blogs and news sites to point out whenever someone forgot to mention the latest Abigail Williams release.

One particularly rainy afternoon, Devastatorious was ham-handedly playing something resembling a ham-handed Mayhem song on his Line6 Pod Pro, which he got on eBay for “like half of list price.” As he came to what some would call a chorus, his buddy Mike Shea (Khhal for our purposes) came running down with a great idea, “Let’s start our own band!” Of course, this sounded like a great idea to Devastatorious. “Ok, well first things first – we need a totally bitchin’ name,” he explained.

“Well, yeah of course. What should we call ourselves?”
“The most dark and hardcore thing ever.”
“Nothing was darker than when my mother mourned the loss of Sprinkles (the shivering family Teacup Something or other).”
“Fuck yeah, the idea of mourning is deep as hell.”
“What else should we include?”
“How about something sexual? Not because we’ll end up having sex six months from now, or anything.”

As he said this, Greg shot a look to the right to avoid eye contact with his new bandmate. Mike continued looking at him awkwardly for a moment before breaking the silence:

“This might not be cool, but check it out.”
“Ok”
“Remember that totally gay band from back in the day Orgy.”
“Yea, they suck.” No they don’t, he thought to himself.
“Well, how about we take ‘Orgy’ back and make it cool again?”

As if they had both sprung rods simultaneously, Greg and Mike looked up from their in-progress black painted nails and exclaimed triumphantly:

“ORGY OF MOURNING!”

-END-

And that’s how I imagined that going.

Hello dear readers,

I’m so sorry I have been gone so long. I just checked the stats and I have not updated since April 22nd, exactly one month ago. Why have I not updated in such a very long time? Well, there are several reasons, one of which is true: 1) I have been busy helping DJ design our new site layout, which should be released within the coming weeks 2) I have not had an internet connection or a working computer for several weeks and 3) It was the end of the semester and blogging will not take priority over school until DJ can start paying me.
But just because I haven’t been blogging doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about blogging. I have! Quite a bit actually. Look no further than my hilarious twitter account for proof of the wacky ideas I’ve been thinking. I’m such a loopy lad!

Well, on May 11th at precisely 7:50PM I let @SmartassRadio know that I would be writing a blog about Electabuzz and when I make a promise I keep it. So, after much ado, here is a blog entry that could possibly interest a very bored twelve year old a decade ago:

Hello, my name is Electabuzz and I’m an alcoholic.

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If you aren’t an alarmist FoxNews viewer, you’re probably not familiar with the term “sexting.” Clearly, I am. Sexting is the awful play on words that describes when one individual, by their own choosing, takes a naked picture of themself and sends it to someone else via SMS (Short Message Service). The solution to this scourge? Giving the sweet naked pics to this guy. What kills me about the following quote is the use of the sentence structure to create a scene which resembles that of a real job and attorney should be doing, like reviewing photos of the scene of a murder, rape, minor traffic violation, etc.:

Photos of their semi-nude or scantily clad teenage daughters were stacked before him. Mr. Skumanick said the images had been discovered on cellphones confiscated at the local high school.

I can’t believe this is really an issue parents (or anyone) is shocked by. It’s 2009 – could you dolts really be so naive to think your kids aren’t using every piece of technology almost exclusively for personal sexual gratification?

The first text ever.

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Hello internet world, its me, your American Hero with another movie review. This time I’m soder and ready to rip the shizzle out of one of the worst movies of all-time. So hold onto your keyboards as I go off on this terrible movie.

So I get to the theatre a little outside San Jose to see The Knowing. I knew very little about the movie except that it was about the end of the world and one of my favorite actors, Nicolas Cage, was in it. So I was pretty amped up for this movie and ready for Nicky boi to put an end to the end of the world. So after buying my ticket at the great price of 4.50!…unheard of in San Jose…I got some popcorn and a little so-derrr pop and headed into the theatre.

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If you’re my age or a little older you know that Snood is a knockoff of the classic Bubble Bobble derivative, Bust-a-Move. However, when the great Snood boom of 1996 hit the Internet a with a viral force researchers compare to that of Elf Bowling and Hampster Dance combined. (While I’m on the subject, why would HampsterDance.com have any other content but the original? Talk about not knowing your audience…) So, back to the matter at hand. It is absolutely mind boggling that people are still playing Snood. You can play thousands of shitty games online for free and yet it seems people (in my analysis it’s always girls) are still playing Snood.

It has come to my attention that some fortunate people out there may be completely in the dark about Snood. Such as @Mahaviraband who asked “what is ‘snood’???”. My dear friend this is Snood:

The basic idea is that you have to get 3 of the same faces to touch and then it knocks them and anything below them off. You have to clear the board in a certain number of moves as the brick wall lowers throughout the game. It’s a ridiculously simple puzzle game which take about 4-5 seconds to completely master and get over.

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Recently the world has become all a twitter over the latest internet social-networking site to wow the web. I am of course talking about the Netscape Forum Center Twitter. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the site, you may even be members. If you are a member I would encourage you to follow SmartassRadio (DJ) and myself, if you are so inclined. Twitter is a bit of an enigma for me: I don’t know why I like it, yet I do. I have a problem with most everything on the site, specifically the jargon that it has developed. For example, DJ now tweets more often than he roars and I (someone who I have always thought of as independent) am guilty of being a follower in 27 cases. Also, the idea that anyone is actually “networking,” rather than “self-promoting” is a little suspect. Ultimately, I have come to the conclusion that the reason I like twitter is because I like to communicate with the world at large. I enjoy the reassurance I feel knowing that someone can know how I feel. The stain of the whole system is that I have to be inside on a computer procrastinating to really be compelled to tweet.

Well, not anymore. Unlike the webmaster of the Netscape Forum Center, when I am presented with a flawed system I try to fix it. And fix it I have. Today, I would like to introduce the latest venue for social networking: Chirpper ™.

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