Category Archive

There’s an interesting dust-up online over one man’s quest to get his way in a D.C. coffee shop. In a rage-filled nutshell (which does contain a lot…and I mean A LOT…of swearing):

•  Man wants iced espresso but doesn’t get it and so vents his spleen both in the shop and eventually into the blogosphere.

•  Coffee shop owner responds in kind with salty talk we’ve never seen in an official company letter. We are, to be honest, kind of impressed with that.

•  Links on the original blog post to Jack Nicholson and Lily Tomlin freakouts (the former, scripted; the latter, not so much) offer even more angertainment.

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For The Love of God, No More Guy Cleavage

(Photo: American Apparel)

Head on over to Radar Online to read all about the threat to America that is The Men’s Deep V T-Shirt, paradoxically most prominently offered by American Apparel. Thanks to fashion-forward, coastal dwelling tools, the men’s t-shirt has devolved from one of nature’s most benificent and unadulterated garments — the broccoli of menswear, if you will — to a hair-baring, pec-peeking sign of the apocalypse. It’s truly awful, this thing. But it is fun to read other people hating it just as much as we do.

Incidentally, the male sternum quote is from Kempt, and it made us laugh. A lot.

And if you think the Deep V is bad, consider this abomination, also courtesy of American Apparel:

(Photo: American Apparel, i.e., Make the Bad Man Stop, Mommy)

What’s next? Male tube tops? Ooo! Tool Tops! We said it first!

UPDATE:  Brian Collins has graciously peered into fashion’s future to give us this privileged, photoshopped glimpse at the inevitable Tool Top.

Wow.

Just noticed something reeeeeal strange on muxtape. Someone has cracked/hacked the site so that every playlist is filled with a single song, “Good Disease” by Aim (with Stephen Jones). Even on the couple of playlists we’ve created here at Marlin, it’s all this one song.

Granted, it’s not a horrible song. But we’re wondering just how much good press can come out of this stunt. If everybody’s playlist goes back to its pre-Aim integrity, fine and dandy. Kudos to some enterprising little techno marketing hipsters for blasting everyone with this release.

But if this stunt wipes out all those existing playlists? I’m personally going to set up a little voodoo shrine for Aim (and you too, Stephen Jones). There will be needles and fire and possibly goat parts.

UPDATE: Muxtape just took the site offline around 3:20ish CST. Gimme my playlist back, pretty please.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE!: Muxtape is claiming that what happened was a database error, not a hack. Still not back, 24 hours later, so in the meantime let’s enjoy the latest from Bodies of Water, courtesy of Gorilla vs. Bear, yes? Yes!

To be honest, we haven’t figured out yet exactly how the game should work. But here’s what we have figured out through countless hours of methodical research.

1. Yngwie Malmsteen, 80s hair-rock badass and pioneer of the neoclassical/eurometal/ three-headed-dragon-defeating guitar movement, hasn’t changed his wardrobe essentials since 1984.
2. Evidence of this can be found in the Tour Photos section of Yngwie’s site, with pics as recent as 2008. Yes, there are a lot.
   
3. The Open-To-The-Navel Puffy Shirt and Way-Too-Tight Black Leather Pants combination is extremely potent, musically and most likely otherwise. A wardrobe malfunction on this guy could wipe out the entire front row.

So…how to make a game out of this?

You could go the easy route, head to the site with your friends and simply take a drink every time you see Yngwie wearing what we like to call his Fingertap Armor. (Not recommended for liability reasons.)

Or you can take the long hard slog approach: Scour the site looking for the one or two times Yngwie is caught sans uniform. It’s like Where’s Waldo with a lot more sweat and hair (and sweat).

Either way, enjoy the Malmsteen.

We at Marlin decided to start a new tradition this Easter. It’s called “Barely keep the office from burning down by smelling the smoke caused by a short in a bathroom fan.”

Thanks to the sensational olfactory sense of Marlin’s own Sherry Schellack, and what we can only assume was divine Easter Bunny intervention, we were able to avoid a major catastrophe this weekend. Sherry just happened to be in the office on Sunday when she smelled smoke coming from the woman’s bathroom. At that point, we would have run around in circles screaming at the top of our lungs, but she was able to keep cool and get the fire department on the scene within minutes. Luckily, the fire was taken care of before Marlin reduced to little more than a pile of ashes for us to park our cars on this morning.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: “Hey Marlin, what are you, some kind of calamity magnet?”

First of all, that’s Mr. Marlin to you. Second, you can’t magnetize a calamity. No one has the technology. All in all a very poorly worded question we assume you asked, but we’ll answer it anyway.

Between the flood and the fire, we’ve considered almost every possible explanation for our recent run of bad luck. So far, we’ve concluded that the fire was either a separate event, featuring arson-happy bunnies, or that evil Tiki Statue we brought back from Hawaii on our last family vacation is to blame for everything.

Either way, we’re pretty sure we’ve become an insurance company’s worst nightmare. It seems to be one natural disaster after another. Who knows what’s next. Do you think insurance covers swarms of locusts?

It seems we were a bit premature in mocking a news story about padded lampposts in London. Apparently it was just a stunt pulled by the company 118m8 to promote some sort of padded lamppost selling company (that’s what we got out of the stunt anyway).

We want our readers to know that we strive to mock only the most accurate news stories and apologize to anyone who wrote letters to Queen Elizabeth II in regards to our post.

Thankfully, there is a silver lining to all of this in the form of a lesson. If you need lamppost pads, get them from 118m8. If you need lamppost news, don’t get it from Foxnews.com.

Lampposts have been a major hindrance to pedestrians for centuries. It is a fight that goes back to before (we’re pretty sure) the invention of fire. Just try wandering around the streets aimlessly with your eyes closed and an inner ear infection and not running into one headfirst. We dare you.

Luckily, we may not have to live in fear much longer. In London, a street is experimenting with padded lampposts.

A survey showed that 68,000 people were injured in the U.K. last year while chatting or texting and that more than a quarter of the respondents want lines on the pavement so they know where to walk.

Yep, apparently people are paying so much attention to their cell phones, texting devices, kidney pies, tea cups, stickers and whatever else people in England enjoy, they can’t avoid stationary objects.

Of course, we don’t think a padded lamppost and lined pavement is going far enough. Sure, lines to show you where to walk are fine, but how are we going to know when to eat? Where to sleep? When and where to use the restroom? Where are those lines?

Unless London wants streets full of pedestrians slamming into lampposts, eating trash and sleeping in their own feces, we recommend they get serious about texters’ needs.

And be careful. They could take this all the way to the queen. As long as you draw them a line.

Except to say this: God bless you, Brian Collins, and your pissy sign-making abilities.

We’d like to start today’s post out with a riddle. What’s better than a basement full of old dusty junk? If your answered included anything other than ‘a flooded basement full of old dusty junk’ then you were right.

Yep, it seems our emergency pump took the weekend off too and the basement, where we kept all of our most prized possessions (as far as the insurance company is concerned), got all wet and ruinified. It took the combined effort of Team Marlin™ to clean it out and make the world safe for dry, productive basements once more.

Actually, we now have an office full of junk (gold, if the insurance company is still reading) and no place to put it. After all the cardboard and paper (pearls and pendants) were thrown away we were left with a basement full of wet desks and soggy computers (ruby studded HDTVs and pure crystal ancient artifacts).

Of course, once all of that junk is gone we’ll have a lot of space to fill. On a totally unrelated note, recent studies have shown that Wiis and plasma TVs don’t take up much space. Probably because all that space is needed for the hefty amounts of cool those two products produce. Those same studies show that they also increase productivity well over 100 percent.

We’re no scientists, but that sounds about right to us.

Just when it looked like we’d only have a few tornadoes to worry about this winter (we never thought we’d say that particular sentence), nature decided that a tornado in the middle of January wasn’t enough and gave Springfield another big ol’ helping of ice storm. Frankly, we would have preferred mashed potatoes.

While not as devastating as last year’s, this ice storm was enough to cause just over 11,000 outages, closing some businesses (your friendly neighborhood Marlinites were only out of commission Monday) and causing others to go without power for several days. It was also the cause of some minor earthquakes as kids jumped for joy with no less than three days off school. Actually, with all of those kindergarteners running around town and businesses closed, we’re surprised there wasn’t more looting.

Now that it’s over we’re hoping we’ll get a break from the natural disasters for a while. We could do with a few months where the biggest weather concern we have is whether or not our raincoats go with our new galoshes (yes, in case you were wondering, and quite nicely at that). At least until nature decides to hit us with some sort of super ice tornado…that can shoot lasers…and talk. Sounds like a summer blockbuster to us.

Photo credit: resident meteorophotographer / guy-who-likes-standing-outside-when-the-&%*#-hits-the-fan, Matt Rose

Last year around this time, we were encased in a thick, tree-snapping, power line-devouring, insanely cold blanket of ice. Tens of thousands were out of power for weeks, generators were being sold off the back of trucks in parking lots, extended families and neighbors huddled in front of fireplaces for days on end, dogs turned on cats, cannibals roamed the city council chambers (ok maybe not the last one, but dogs were definitely turning on cats).

So how fun is it that this year we had a few days of record January heat—up in the 70s in some places, breaking hundred-year-old records—followed all last night by hours of tornado-spawning thunderstorms. The line of monster storms ran all the way from Oklahoma through Wisconsin, with Springfield sitting right in the pipeline. The official count still isn’t in, but there were several tornadoes spotted on the ground in Monett, Strafford, even in Springfield proper, with multiple damage areas and, sadly, two reported fatalities in Missouri. Here’s to hoping that number doesn’t climb.

Sorry for the downer blog. Happens when you spend all night listening to tornado sirens wail (even if tornadoes are nowhere NEAR your city) and making repeated scurries down to the basement. The good news (or not-so-horrible news) is that as of now the damage doesn’t seem as devastating as it could’ve been. Even more upbeat news? The author of this particular blog didn’t lose power, cable or internet during the reportedly hurricane-strength winds. Remarkable, given the somewhat spotty track record of some local providers (looking right at you, Mediacom).

It is written somewhere in the vast, enigmatic Rulebook of Blog that one cannot leave a post up about one holiday (say, Halloween) past the occurrence of another holiday (say, Thanksgiving). Which is exactly what we here at Notchweiner were about to do.

That said, we’re freakin’ busy. And this post about not posting will have to serve as our weak attempt at not violating the One Post/Two Holidays rule. The letter of the law has been upheld, even though its spirit has been crushed under a mountain of job starts.

Happy Thanksgiving, and check back soon for many wonderful things (including what we hope will become a monthly feature, Meet a Notchweiner!).