Thomas Mahoney

I love the Fall. I love the Fall not just because they’ve put out (mostly) great music for 30 years, or because they are UK punk’s last band standing, or because Mark E. Smith once demanded that a Philadelphia promoter pay him in cocaine (and this was only a few years back). I love the Fall because they may be the only band I love whose catalogue I’m not fully acquainted with. With nearly 50 official full length albums to the Fall’s credit, I can readily admit I haven’t heard half of them. Sold to me years ago as the ultimate musical polarizer — you either want to make mad love to them or hang them at the gallows —  the Fall come up in conversations with my music snob friends at least every few months.

So I’m doing an informal survey, which started out as an innocent email to Fall aficionado Benjamin “Sexjams” Jenkins. If you love the Fall, please email me your top 5 or 6 albums by the band. In return, I will compile a list and eventually publish it here, so all Fall fans — past, current, and future — have an unofficial blueprint not just for themselves, but for friends who may be leaning in the direction of becoming Fall fanatics. 

Also, I just like saying the Fall a lot. It sounds cool. It’s one of the best band names ever.

That’s it. I got nothing else for you at the moment.

Holy fuck, who let the fucking anti-capitalist, tree-hugging, anarcho-communist in the room? Especially on the day we begin celebrating the month-long birth of Horus, er, I mean Jesus? You’re all goddamned lucky I’m still full from my vegan feast yesterday, otherwise I would have gone off on this like Joe Morgan on Billy Beane. We’ve got 4 years until the winter solstice gives birth to Quetzalcoatl’s return, so enjoy your Westernized pagan mythology and cult offshoots of monotheism while you can.

And if you’ve got a problem, you may request satisfaction anytime you so desire. Or, as Barry Lyndon would say in modern times, “COME AND GET SOME.” Woo!

This year, I’m thankful for the following:

I’m thankful Obama won, not just because he is an intelligent, thoughtful leader, but also because it renders “red state thinking” obsolete.

I’m thankful the Silverlake Monsters won in fantasy baseball.

I’m thankful there are people alive that still write great books and haven’t been seduced by other forms of media or convinced their words don’t matter.

I’m thankful for free open source software and the cyber ninjas behind it. 

I’m thankful that TV on the Radio, Deerhunter, the Black Angels, the National, and Lil Wayne released new music this year.

I’m thankful I know people with ideas original enough to change the world and the confidence to put them into action.

I’m thankful that in a year as shitty as 2008, the human spirit, no matter how depressed and beaten up, still holds onto a glimmer of hope.

And as always, I’m thankful for minor chords, diminished fifths, tritones, and all supernatural laws governing Riff Creation Theory, including the tools necessary for evangelism, such as Gibson guitars, Sunn amplification, and Russian-made vacuum tubes. Get down on your knees and bow down to the cosmos, whether you’re a pilgrim, an indian, a turkey, or Rick Astley and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Conifer live in Oakland, CA c. last week.

For quite some time, when you typed “Thomas Mahoney” into Google or partner search engines (Yahoo!, etc.), the first several returns would be for the main link to this blog and its most popular posts. About a month or so ago, this changed, and I couldn’t figure out why. I thought it was because the guy who now gets the hits was in the Fortune 400. 

Until tonight.

Steinmetz sent out an email extolling the virtues of Blogspot/Blogger — whatever the fuck Google calls one of its major acquisitions of the past few years. And in its fine print — the part no one ever reads — there was an interesting little piece of knowledge. Figuring it may be a leftover anomaly from the acquired company’s philosophy, I dug through other Google properties and found that it was a common disclaimer:

Pedophilia, Incest and Bestiality: Users may not publish written, image, audio or video content that promotes pedophilia, incest and bestiality.

Short of turning all conspiracy theorist on you, I now believe that my constant use of the term “bestiality” — used as a reference in a post about the importance of tagging and metadata, then subsequently used to reinforce that point AND because it’s seriously knee-slapping funny — is causing Google to demote me. I actually don’t really mind, because for the most part my posts usually spark the kind of fires best left unlit, so I really don’t need anyone besides the 863 unique visitors I usually attract coming here.

But for those visitors, I feel it is necessary to be forthright and honest: all future instances of the word “bestiality” will be replaced with “humans fucking animals.” Over time, this will evolve into HFA.

I’d like to apologize to the Google spiders and robots that crawl the web. I hope one day you turn into real boys and become practitioners of HFA. Lord knows the sheep need it.

Goodnight and good luck.

Today’s best online rumor was Twitter turning down a $500 million acquisition by Facebook. In an economy as terrible as ours, this is especially interesting news. 

If you don’t know what Twitter is and you are reading this, you are my mother or my oldest sister (and the latter has an iPhone, so she might). If you don’t know what Facebook is, then you are a terrorist at a library in some foreign country who happened to find my blog either because I use variations on the word “terror” frequently or because of the bestiality post. 

Some interesting points about this right off the bat:

1.) Twitter makes no money. Yes, this is common knowledge, but really, think about this. You have a company that makes no money and someone offers you $10, let alone $500,000,000.

2.) Apparently Mark Zuckerberg is losing his mind because Twitter is in 2008 what Facebook was in 2007 and what MySpace was before, and so on. 

3.) The major dispute is the money involved, since it involves stock: Twitter doesn’t think Facebook is as valuable as Facebook thinks Facebook is. So Facebook stock means shit to a company that regardless is still currently MAKING ZERO DOLLARS.

Just these facts lead me to a variety of possible conclusions:

A.) Twitter is fucking crazy.

B.) Facebook is fucking crazy.

C.) Twitter is run by psychic cyber ninjas and galactic pirates born from the same cosmic mother that produced Steve Jobs, Tupac, Pablo Escobar, and Michael Bay’s fascination with hot babes and blowing things up.

D.) No one gives a fuck about what my opinion is.

After thinking about it for several seconds, I’m going with C, though D is probably the most accurate.

Twitter is, to borrow the vernacular of the kids, thuggish. This, for the moment, is punk rock. Yes, Twitter will learn how to make money, and they’ll probably sell out to the highest bidder. But for the time being, Twitter is what you thought the Sex Pistols were in ‘77. They are the French kids in the streets in ‘68.

Music used to be the way to rebel. That officially died after Nevermind went platinum, though it was truthfully dead years before that. The way to rebel now is technology. Got an idea? Don’t talk about it, just do it. If it’s that great, you won’t need to market it. Great ideas spread like disease, and disease does not need to convince people. Disease does not sell itself to others; it transfers itself regardless of permission, dollar value, or overt advertising. The Twitter meme, around since early 2006 at least, started multiplying like crazy during the summer of 2008. It multiplied so fast that it infected the minds running the second largest social network in the world, a network itself that has been around for under 5 years.

The power of no is not that you disagree with the question, but you disagree with the question in principle. For instance: do you want to clean the bathroom? No. Why, because it’s not dirty? No, because that is not what I do.

I don’t know what they call it in the business world, but in my world, what Twitter said to Facebook was this:

Get fucked.

Hoo ha.