NEWS RECAP

by Paint Thompson

1. These people died this week:
A. Gerald Ford
B. James Brown
C. Saddam Hussein
D. Various others whose names did not make it to headlines or sound bites

2. These things happened this week:
A. A Canadian ice cap fell off
B. Saddam Hussein was executed
C. I found the external volume control on my computer
D. It's 50 degrees in Chicago on December 30
E. Millions of environmentalists are freaking out because not only do they realize the mild temps are a result of global warming busting ass around the world with forest fire rapidity, but also, they are actually enjoying the mild temps. Oh, the guilt. The environmentalists say: Will somebody please think of the children?

3. Here are the things the pundits are discussing:
A. Crooked Chicago politicians
B. Why does Arnold Schwarzenegger make a brief cameo in that movie with The Rock that they just showed on channel 9 yesterday afternoon?
C. Bit of a deficit in the ole government budget

MIXED MESSAGES

by Razz Trumble

I used to think that Steely Dan song went, "in the mornin you'll go runnin for the man who stole your wallet." I imagined some middle-aged dude, haggard and unshaven, tired from a full night of gambling at a darkened table in the back room of a restaurant in Vegas, off off the Strip, wearing a suit with a loosened tie, smelling of bourbon, smoking Pall Malls, the kind of guy who is perpetually pissed off and shows it by giving exceptionally annoying people very brief glimpses of the gun he keeps on his hip, the kind of guy who talks in monosyllables, if at all, and uses a gruff and scratchy voice when he does.

The Steely Dan lyric always made me think of this guy running out of the back room of the restaurant, surprisingly quick and catlike, chasing after some dunghead from the Midwest who sat in on the last game because the owner of the restaurant felt sorry for him and thought he had a nice face, but the dunghead was on a mission because he needed to make money quick because his girlfriend needed an operation to remove a tumor from her hair, which was causing her whole head to erupt in curly unkempt sparks from her follicles and this was inevitably causing problems at her job as a shampoo model and how could they have the twins they were planning on having if she lost her job as a shampoo model?

The dunghead from the Midwest had no marketable skills, except for baling hay, but he was in the West now, and there was no hay to bale and he wouldn't do it even if it was offered because HE WAS NOT HIS DAD'S CHILD ANYMORE, but neither was he a smart poker player, so when the gravelly-voiced guy with the gun at his hip took a leave of absence from the card game to go to the "john" and "see a man about a horse," the dunghead knocked the dude's wallet off the table and took off in a mad dash reminiscent of his final track meet in high school.

But the lyric isn't, "in the mornin you'll go runnin for the man who stole your wallet." The lyric is actually, "in the mornin you'll go gunnin for the man who stole your water." I suppose it's way more dramatic to be dehydrated than to be moneyless, especially if you're the gun-happy dude in Vegas, because, probably, you know people who can give you money, being a gun-happy dude in Vegas and all, but those same people might not have water. It's a desert, you know, Vegas is.

I also used to think Jimi Hendrix was saying, "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy." Which was nice, you know, the rocker dude banging out a killer song and stopping in the middle of it to kiss this guy he likes. So I always thought it was no biggie for one dude to kiss another dude because Jimi Hendrix is about as cool as cool gets and if he's kissing dudes, then kissing dudes is cool.

I also never thought I had these lyrics wrong because the first time I heard this song was when I was in the middle of a really intense and totally platonic love affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald and those guys he was writing about were always gay and smoking fags, which means they were really happy (rich) and smoking cigarettes and playing tennis, too, in clothes that were never anything but blindingly white, so you can imagine my surprise when I got to my first day of gym in high school and I found out that "smoking" a "fag" was something the creepy janitor did on weekends. Oh, these times, they are a-changin'. Anyway, I still don't see what the problem is with dudes kissing dudes. It's way better than dudes bombing dudes. But, whatever.

DELUSIONAL

by PhD McGee

This dude's a fuckin nutter.

FUCK MONSTERS

by LuLu LaRue

An academic and therefore reliable study has found that nine out of ten of you twinkie whores are having premarital sex. You godless freaks.

Seriously, I tease because I love. And when I say, "nine out of ten of you" what I mean is, "nine out of ten of us." The majority of us are having premarital sex. This is newsworthy. This is newsworthy because . . . the majority of us are doing it, but perhaps we don't know we're doing it?

Ha. Of course I know why this is being reported. This is being reported because there's nothing else going on. There's the war, but we already know all about that. There's the power shift in government, a new head of the Department of Warmongering, and a schizophrenic role reversal on the approach to the war we already know about. Obviously, it's best to report on the obvious. Plus, it's always helpful to report news that will make the Christian Coalition freak the fuck out.

You should also be aware that nine out of ten of us breathe air. That last one out of ten does not because he's a sexless automaton.

THE CTA CONSPIRACY

by PhD McGee

You might think that day after day of train delays and reroutes on the CTA are a result of shoddy management or insufficient attention to preventive maintenance. But after yesterday, when two (2) lines were not running through the Loop during rush hour, I started to suspect a bigger, far more insidious, reason for the CTA's incessant breakdowns: Colors.

When the train lines were named after destinations, were there this many disruptions in service? Possibly. But researching that would destroy my theory so I'm not going to pursue it. My theory is this: Imagine you are a train car. You are the Brown Line. But you don't feel like brown. Every fiber in your squeaky, metal being tells you that you are not brown. You feel more tan or sometimes chartreuse.

Your misnomer causes you great stress. You become crabby. You bitch a lot. You start to wallow in your crabby crabtopolis. This causes the rails on which you run to dislike and eventually hate you. Finally, the rails upon which you roll and upon which you dump your crabby crabtopolis do what any self respecting rails would do: They implode.

Fires ensue, tunnels fill with smoke, lines close down. If you were named Ravenswood like you used to be, would you be the catalyst for this colossal collapse of service? No. No you would not.

The other theory I'm working on is the Republicans. It's just like these guys to try to undermine the public transportation system in a predominantly Democratic city. For the record, I also believe the Republicans are behind the odd and passionate need Rex Grossman has for tossing interceptions.

BEST BANDS OF 2006 THAT NEVER REALLY WENT ANYWHERE

by Razz Trumble

As alert Lost Blueprint readers know, I am a musician. A rock musician. Although, depending on the season, sometimes I'm folk and other times I'm alt-country and that one time there was that ill-advised emo thing I had going, but then I stopped taking ecstasy. I'm also very punk when the occasion calls for it. Therefore, my former bandmates and I have compiled this list of the best bands we never really got up and running during 2006:

1. Frozen Cum Stains
Our punk band. We required two guitars, could only find one, and we probably could've used someone who could've played it. Frozen Cum Stains had an unceremonious breakup when Johnny decided he didn't like singing songs about "screaming." For the record, we never wrote a song about screaming, we wrote, "you should be screaming," because Johnny is so clueless we actually had to tell him how to sing. We fired Johnny.

2. Cooler by the Lake
Our jazz band. We had cool t-shirts: The Chicago skyline with an upright bass tilted insouciantly between the Sears Tower and Three First National. We broke up. Jazz is hard.

3. Whack Your Mole
Our rock band. We knew four chords, so, obviously, we were one up on Nirvana. Which was our problem, because Nirvana is this band from the early 90s, which was last century, and who the fuck cares about last century? No one, that's who. Also, guess what--no clubs wanna book a band that says in its press kit, "We play more chords than Nirvana." We broke up when Eric decided to show up for a show at a friend's party wearing full on cop-from-The Village People regala and the entire party liked it. That's when we started . . .

4. Boogie Swanksters
Our disco band. We were cashing in on the 70s revival thing. OK, and also, the chicks at the party that Whack Your Mole was supposed to be playing were really digging the disco. The problem with disco is, it's supposed to make people dance and yelling, "Dance motherfuckers!" at a crowd of drunk and stoned people who used to be your friends doesn't really do it. But that's not why Boogie Swanksters broke up. Boogie Swanskters broke up because I am philosophically opposed to synthesizers. They are not instruments, no matter how many times you say they are. You could also play a kazoo and say it's a flute, but then you'd just be a big, fat, dumbass, synthesizer-playing nonmusician. In bell bottoms.

BEARS WIN

by Paint Thompson

Actually, they won on Monday, but I didn't get a chance to post this because I am just now coming out of my Miller High Life-induced coma.

GO BEARS!

DALEY RUNS AGAIN

by Lost Blueprint Investigative Team

Mayor Richard M. Daley is expected to announce this afternoon his candidacy for his one bazillionth term of office. His platform: Flowers In Every Median. Many speculate this platform is part of an overriding city beautification project. However, the Lost Blueprint Investigative Team has uncovered information that suggests otherwise. Evidently, the Flowers in Median Campaign is the foundation for an ultimate ban on left turns, the logic being that if you can't see around foliage, why would you make the turn? For those of you who doubt this ask yourselves this: When was the last time you were aware of a left turn contributing heavily to a local political campaign?

WHY I HATE HIGH FIDELITY

by Razz Trumble

The novel and the movie, even though I actually had a somewhat good time reading the novel, but probably only because I read it while at the beach and I used to associate it with girls in bikinis and other girls in bikinis rubbing lotion on themselves and that makes for a damn fine novel except that now, those dreams of creamy sunsoaked skin are completely obliterated because those fuckers who made the movie of the book parked on my street while they filmed that stupid fucking movie and by the way, that rain scene, where John Cusack is whining into a pay phone--it wasn't raining, it was a hose and it was sticking out of the second story window of Jinx and there's no motherfucking pay phone there, there was a bike rack, which got moved, so that the movie company, Assfucker of Movieville, Inc., could film a film that obligated them to set up twenty thousand vans and trucks along the street I lived on and which obligated some power hungry junky freakazoid "set guy" to scream at me one night when I came home raging drunk, riding my fixed gear, and decided to simultaneously skid the length of the street while yelling at Beau, the greatest drinker of whiskey who has ever lived, that InnerTown is NOT open at 5:30am no matter how many times and how hard you pound on the door and also, there isn't a damn person in this neighborhood that gives a shit that you left your favorite lighter on the pool table that afternoon.

The reason I am bringing this up now is that I just read a piece of cultural criticism about books and musicals and their similarities and differences in terms of their effects on the canon of Art and Culture, which made me think of High Fidelity, the musical, and also the musical of all that Billy Joel music with Twyla Tharp or Thorpe or maybe Sharp or whatever--the leggy dancer lady--and I thought, "My god, it's a trend!" and while none of this is technically a trend because a) none of it is happening right now; b) two does not make a trend; c) none of it is actually related in any way; and d) I'm biased because currently, I am contributing to this trend as I am in production for the musical version of "The Metamorphosis," where Gregor is not a dung beetle, but a mosquito, who wants to tap dance, but can't, because his family insists on him pursuing the lost art of interpretive dance, which he simply cannot get, being overly mosquito-esque and therefore unable to make up his own steps, despite his valiant attempts to do so, so instead of being stuck in his room out of sheer frustration from not being able to put his glasses on his head, he is instead voluntarily staying there out of embarrassment and then there's the happy scene at the end where the entire family realizes the importance of dance, any kind of dance, and peace reigns supreme; and so, as you can see, it is scientifically and artisitically creepy, this trend of making musicals, despite what they are based on, creepy in a way that reeks of an impending conspiracy much like the way I am pretty sure there is an impending conspiracy where world leaders are not real people, merely bobbleheads who are controlled by aliens who have a fierce sense of humor when it comes to bright, shiny things like bombs, which the aliens see as enjoyable, like fireworks.

The beauty of punctuation is that you can make one sentence go on until infinity, which works out well when you've stuffed your head so full of hallucinogenic drugs that periods have become physically, mentally, brutally, intimidating.

WHERE DID MYOPIC GO?

by PhD McGee

I keep thinking it's still on Division so when I'm trekking over there, to that neighborhood, where I used to live, but don't anymore, I walk up and down Division between Ashland and Damen, muttering to myself because where the fuck is it? How do you hide an entire used book store? This is usually when my palms start sweating because when I want to read a beat up copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I don't like to wait. A Kundera jones is an ugly thing to live through.

I can remember Myopic on Division because that's when I used to live right by it and I spent many days reading biographies of dead British men and The Art of War. It's when I lived in an apartment with six roommates and paid $100 a month for it and considered myself politically active because I read the headline on the Tribune everyday. I got through many days drinking Boones Farm and eating Ramen Noodles, which are nutritious, if you drink enough Boones Farm. I think I was also going through college at the time. And by "going through," I mean, "flunked out."

But now Myopic isn't there anymore. It's on Milwaukee, though I still find myself stomping down Division, looking for the eye, expecting the sign to jump out at me soon, wondering where that shoe boutique came from and why that bar has a red velvet rope in front of it and where the hell are all the fuckin whinos? When did it become safe to walk around here alone at night?

My friends say I'm living in the past, "like, way last centruy, dude," and by "friends," I mean, "voices in my head." And yeah, I know that I'm living in the past, but give me my daydreams because I used to live cheaply, eat hardly, drink often, and it was always summer and that's why I prefer to live in a world where Myopic is on Division.

Myopic Books. Your life will be way better if you go there right now and spend all your money.

FUCKING FUCKERS FROM FUCKERVILLE

by Prissy McMouth

Yeah, so, I'm the one in charge of the Lost Blueprint World Domination Project. This is because I'm very responsible. It's also because I missed the last staff meeting. Anyway, this means I have to figure out ways to take over the world under the Lost Blueprint logo. Which we don't have yet. But once we do--oh boy, look out.

So, while scoping out the scene at Myspace, you know what I noticed? Technology, that's what. By which I mean, I like to do my stalking of hot guys on Myspace and now you know what they have? They have TRACKERS. Like, you can track where I am when I'm stalking you. You can track what page I hit before I got to you. You could probably track how many of your friends I'm stalking, too. This sucks. I mean, good stalking is wholly dependent on anonymity and this fucking technology doesn't allow for that and you know what I have to say to that? I say what the fuck. Oh, sorry, hipster techno freaks--I mean, WTF. Stupid technology.

FUCKING FUCKERS FROM FUCKERVILLE, PT 2

by Prissy McMouth

We're considering changing our format to an alliterative-profanity headline format. Does anyone have a problem with that?

GO TO THIS

by Lost Blueprint Editorial Board

2nd Story storytellers! Reading kick ass stories!

DETAILS:

The Stained Glass
1735 Benson Avenue
Evanston, IL 60201
7pm
Tuesday, Dec. 5
More info: http://www.serendipitytheatre.org/

BEARS WIN

by Paint Thompson

NFC North Division Champs.

That is all.

WE'RE MARKETING!

Britney Spears!

Look:

Lost Blueprint

We don't have anything to say about Britney Spears. We just stuck her name in this post so we show up on searches. Neener neener.

RULES OF THE SNOW

by Razz Trumble

Let's just say that last night you went out to see your friend's band play and accidently got caught up in a game of I Can Do More Shots Than You. That would make waking up this morning somewhat upsetting. It would make mucking through snow this morning pretty close to ungodly. It would also make you wonder why the online publication you work for insists on having an office when the editorial board has got to realize how much more efficient it would be to have a workforce that works from home.

Anyway, that's a point for the next staff meeting. For now, my assignment is to give you Chicago's Winter Rules. These rules are in no way endorsed by the Democratic Machine or any lackeys thereof.

1. If you were drunk last night, you should've kept drinking. If you went home and went to bed, claiming on the way out of the bar that you "have to get up in the morning," you're a dumb ass.

2. When walking on the formerly visible sidewalk, don't walk on the path that's already trodden. Metaphorically, this just shows you're an uncreative boob. In the interest of efficiency, however, if you walk on the line between the trodden path and the pretty, untouched side snow that is periodically punctuated with dog piss, you will be able to get stable footing and therefore move quicklyer.

3. You should wear boots. Why aren't you wearing boots? It's Chicago in the winter, you heathen freakazoid.

4. Stomp your feet whenever you reach unsnowed concrete. Doing this releases the excess snow that builds up on the soles of your footwear that could ultimately be your ticket to a snowy game of slip-n-slide; it also allows you to work out any frustrations you may have due to your employer's byzantine expectation of attendance, head-splitting hangover, or general disgust with your decision to stay in Chicago when all your buddies from school took off for the West Coast. In my defense, in summer, Chicago could kick LA's freaky ass inside out.

I need coffee.

CHECKIN OUT DA SHIT

by LuLu LaRue

New column: What's happening on your idiot box and in the movies.

#1: Rocky #3,456 is coming soon. I predict Rocky will ultimately win the Big Fight after conquering crippling self doubt and possibly bankruptcy/loss of self respect/divorce/death of a loved one/severe alcoholism/messy accident with a power tool in the shed after a drunken night with the new manager.

#2: Charlie Brown's Christmas Special. This was on the other night. Did you see it? You should have, you pagan shithead. If you did see it, then you know there were moments of silence, which I thought had to do with the fact that my tv was made in the Paleolithic Era and is currently operating through a complex system of pulleys and little dinosaur-like animals who run frantically around a hamster wheel. As it turns out, no, my tv is actually operating on this brand new invention called electricity. And the moments of silence inevitably occurred after mentioning something religious like god, gratitude, chocolate cake, or christmas trees. Obviously, this was on ABC, the network that is the broadcast equivalent of the mixer in the bowl of religion and politics.

#3: Charlotte's Web is coming to theaters near you. I will not review this nor can I review this. I spent endless traumatic hours as a kid crying ruthlessly into my pillow because Charlotte DIES. THE SPIDER FUCKING DIES and I've never been so broken hearted in my young life as I was when I read Charlotte's Web. Except for when I went to see Bambi and Bambi's mother DIES IN A FOREST FIRE. Or maybe she dies and then there's a forest fire. Whatever. The point is, it's a wonder I still have eyeballs in my head.