Five possible career moves for John Ashcroft

  1. become genial TV spokesman for Crisco, the preferred ad hoc head-anointing oil of evangelicals everywhere
  2. hang out at the food court; throw piping-hot buffalo wings at breast-feeding mothers
  3. take internet veterinary course; learn to euthanize cats
  4. write and produce one-man, all-singing, all-dancing revue: Room 101!
  5. find similar country with too damned many civil rights on the books
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Five terrible fake articles in Waaaaa!, the notional magazine for hipster Noe Valley mothers

  1. Clogs: They’re just so comfortable!
  2. Tough Choices: One baby, two dogs or two babies, one dog?
  3. Election Special: Which clever t-shirt will you force baby to wear?
  4. Busy Mom Discipline: Try hitting the baby with the spaniel
  5. Why can’t I name them all “Tyler?”: One mother’s painful journey of discovery
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Five favorite guitar players right now

  1. Charles Bissell (The Wrens)
  2. Andy Cohen (Silkworm)
  3. Roger Miller (Mission of Burma)
  4. Patrick Pentland (Sloan)
  5. Geoff Farina (Karate)
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Five subject lines from recent spams that would also make good titles for Guided by Voices songs

  1. Confucianism: You Should Carry On
  2. Topsoil Deals Offsetting
  3. Squirehood, What’s Your Wife’s Favorite One?
  4. Secular Rockabye Countryman
  5. Porpoise, Only You Can Superstition
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Five power tools of the unintentionally creepy guy

  1. single red rose
  2. internet “shrine”
  3. anonymous gift of lingerie
  4. naming new hard drive in milady’s honor
  5. rhyming comparisons to “Seven of Nine”
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Five stage names I’d consider if I ever became a singing drag queen

  1. Karla Marxx
  2. Lola Piranha
  3. Curvée Rhodes
  4. Jackie Jills
  5. Margarita Salt
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Five favorite drummers right now

  1. Jim Eno (Spoon)
  2. Ringo Starr (The Beatles)
  3. Bruce Hamilton (Gruel, Bacon Ray)
  4. Jim Lindsay (Oranger)
  5. DJ Bonebrake (X)
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Five cats who hated me

  1. Blackie (1977) – Clawed maniacally at my calves as I slept uneasily
  2. Sushi (1992) – Calm demeanor belied hateful, blood-filled glances
  3. Unnamed neighborhood cat (1979) – Hissed menacingly from the front yard
  4. Sapphire (1998) – Mephistophelean Siamese with transparently homicidal designs
  5. Chuck (1991) – Repeatedly shat on my pillow
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Five random thoughts on sunglasses

  1. If someone leaves their sunglasses in your car and they go unclaimed for five (5) business days, they legally become yours without comment
  2. Don Knotts has macular degeneration so don’t make fun of his big-ass sunglasses
  3. If you’ve spent more than $20.00 on your sunglasses, you probably aren’t spending enough on liquor
  4. The more “futuristic” your sunglasses are, the more likely you are to be living in a farming community (and vice versa)
  5. If you customarily wear sunglasses indoors, you better be blind or Kevin from The Wrens
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Five locations where nearly all my dreams take place

  1. motels
  2. shopping malls
  3. New College
  4. military school
  5. museums
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Five bands I don’t think I’m enjoying as much as I’m supposed to

  1. Radiohead
  2. PJ Harvey
  3. Sleater Kinney
  4. Liz Phair
  5. Scissor Sisters
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Five things I suppose you could do to “the vote” if you ever tire of “rocking” it

  1. Broast the Vote!
  2. Pummel the Vote!
  3. Gently Strum the Vote!
  4. Benchpress the Vote!
  5. Botox the Vote!
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Five companies I suspect I may be the bitch of

  1. Gillette
  2. Apple
  3. Sprint
  4. Costco
  5. Trader Joe’s
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Five skills I’ve allowed to badly atrophy over the years

  1. wheelie popping
  2. snaking, loogie-hocking, and general spitting
  3. climbing and scaling
  4. ramp jumping
  5. snatching stacks of quarters from elbow (as seen on Happy Days)
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Five things it’s probably better not to do when you’re kind of drunk

  1. buy domain names
  2. hire an attorney
  3. do lots of file management from the command line
  4. sort out your finances
  5. telephone people you remember fondly from elementary school
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Five computer technologies I could really use in my physical office

  1. Exposé
  2. incremental searching
  3. undo
  4. sort by date (descending)
  5. cold reboot
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Five people whose death I wish I could have somberly mourned with an austere, one-line weblog post

  1. Spike Jones
  2. Jesse L. Weston
  3. Junior Samples
  4. Dean Atcheson
  5. Señor Wences
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Five things it would probably be disingenuous for me to rap about

  1. the streets
  2. my bitches
  3. thug life
  4. popping a cap in your ass
  5. my milkshake
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Five people I’m pretty sure could take me in a fight

  1. Studs Terkel
  2. Don Knotts
  3. Estelle Getty
  4. Walter Mondale
  5. The Late Ruth Gordon
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Five ass-related words I think I use a lot

  1. metric assload (n.) – a lot
  2. asshat (n.) – willfully ignorant person
  3. assy (adj.) – unacceptably low-quality
  4. big-ass (adj.) – large
  5. asstacular (adj.) – really bad
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Five annoyed San Franciscans you’ll meet in heaven

  1. frowning mom with tall latté and jog stroller
  2. bald, fifty-something massage therapist on recumbent bike
  3. vegan slam poet, hissing during movie trailers
  4. PETA hipster, physically disgusted at your “holocaust burger”
  5. pink-faced guy with chaps and big vein in forehead (and his quizzically identical partner)
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Five web widgets I wish I’d invested in last year

  1. #eee
  2. diagonal lines
  3. centered ~700px content well
  4. “subtle” drop shadows
  5. un-bolded Georgia headings
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Five things that are getting under Zell Miller’s hide

  1. John Kerry openly supports difficult-to-open jars of hard candy
  2. Dueling pistols now stored behind the counter at the Wal-Mart
  3. Do-nothing liberal colleagues want to cut his generous coffee and Vivarin stipend
  4. That ole’ possum just keeps a’gettin’ into his seed corn
  5. Who keeps moving his slippers?
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Five things I learned from watching Metropolis

  1. Biplanes will soon glide gracefully between our great art deco skyscrapers
  2. In the very near future, rich white men will wear really gay pants
  3. When women become evil robots, they like to act kind of slutty and dance
  4. Workers of the year 2026 are in constant danger of being crushed under a pile of allegory
  5. What German actors lack in subtlety, they more than make up for in enthusiasm and interesting haircuts
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Five things I’ll be doing while you’re at Burning Man

  1. carefully stewarding my pallor
  2. repeatedly watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on the TiVo
  3. defecating indoors—copiously, often, and without queueing
  4. not tongue-kissing a sweaty Java programmer in clown makeup named “Shanti”
  5. wearing clothes—lots and lots of square, capitalist, heinous-body-covering clothes
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Five community or civic groups that just didn’t take

  1. Cub Scouts (1976)
  2. Drum & Bugle Corps (1978)
  3. Diplomacy Club (1979)
  4. Special Olympics Club (1984)
  5. Key Club (1985)
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Five fun guitars

  1. $20 no-name, cream-colored pseudo-Jaguar with a broken neck pickup and faux-walnut fretboard (1983)
  2. $150 Cimar Flying-V/Explorer bastardization (1984)
  3. Rickenbacker 660 electric 12-string (1988)
  4. busted-ass $200 Yamaha FG-340II acoustic [that I play to this day] (1988)
  5. Bacon Ray-era single-cutaway Epiphone Special II/VS (1997)
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Five tips that comprise everything I know about digital photography

  1. Shoot at as high a resolution as is reasonable for your camera’s storage capacity
  2. Make sure the light is coming from behind you (and the brighter the better)
  3. Take two or more shots of each thing you photograph (you won’t believe how differently each turns out)
  4. Shoot all closeups of people from above and at a 45° downward angle (enlarges eyes, reduces “meatbeard”)
  5. When in doubt, use the slow-sync flash (aka “Rock and Roll Filter”)
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Five things I’d like to see corner drug dealers suddenly start selling

  1. balsa wood toy airplanes
  2. long grain and wild rice
  3. Golden Books®
  4. novelty gifts, magic tricks, and small puzzles
  5. motivational posters and cassette tapes
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Five dotcom terms that still make me cringe

  1. monetize
  2. “The Enterprise”
  3. mindshare
  4. net net
  5. capture eyeballs
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