Does mail get any better than this?

 From: "Nosduh"

 Subject: Smirk Defeat Protest

 I wanted to give you an update on our Nov. 7 'Welcome Home, Hoser' party in Austin.

 I struck fucking oil, Beverly Hillbilly style.
 I called Smirk campaign HQ in Austin, asking where the governor would be awaiting
 his verdict on election eve.  I was asked who I was, so I answered with,
 "David Rushing, executive VP of Texas A&M College Republicans".

 There was a pause and a "Hold on sir", and I was transferred to another extension.
 After a few rings, a female voice answered the phone with, "David! How are you!"

 Shit.

 They say that when you tell a lie, the only way to cover your tracks is to tell another.
 So I did.  She chatted me up with small talk and bullshit and I did my best to go along
 and not let my Michigan accent mix in with my faked Texan twang.

 Come to find out, supposedly Smirk is gonna party at his ranch on election night.  All I can
 put together is that he'll leave Smirk HQ and head out of town, so picketing on I-35 may be
 a little futile and illegal.  There's no way in hell I'm gonna picket up in Crawford, Texas.
 I hear they still got their hangin' tree nearby (every county in Texas had one at one time).

 But, there's more.  Through the conversation, I found that a few members of the Texas A&M
 College Republicans are invited to hang with Smirk on election night (A&M is a VERY
 conservative school, especially the alumni; apparently the Aggie Republicans had done some
 massive fundraising through the alumni and the Smirk campaign is very grateful).
 She asked me who should be on the list, and I replied with "BartCop".

 I was so dumbfounded at this point i didn't know what to do.
 Somehow I got into the dragon's layer without trying.
 I let the unsuspecting woman go at this point.

 Hmmmm.  I need some advice on what to do here.
 I figure I've already broken the law (I got smart and used a campus phone),
 but there's so much potential here.  What do you think?

 PS - If you put this up, please remove my name, unless you wanna hear about
 a white guy dragged behind a pickup truck in College Station.

 Nosduh,

 ha ha

 I don't see any crimes here, but you did good!
 Course, Nov 7th I'll be right here with dozens of you celebrating like crazy.
 But it's nice to know we're on the list to crash Smirk's party!!

 One More Begala, then we're caught up

 Paul Begala Shoots the Bull

 One sign that Team Bush may be starting to crack: the normally lucid Bush spokesguy
 Ari Fleischer is in today's Washington Post accusing the Gore campaign of possibly
 planting a "mole" in the Bush campaign.  Of course, I have no idea who sent the
 now-infamous Bush debate tapes and briefing materials to Gore aide Tom Downey,
 but if the Gore campaign was trying to infiltrate Bush HQ, why did they blow the whistle
 and alert the FBI?  It's just silly to accuse the Gore camp of that kind of sophomoric nonsense.

 Makes me wonder if perhaps some of the Bushies are suffering from the psychological
 phenomenon of projection, in which folks accuse others of doing things they themselves
 have done.  Nixon is a classic case: he saw conspirators against him under every desk --
 because he himself was using dirty tricks against his political enemies.

 Fleischer's tantrum cost Bush a news story.  The media picked up on Ari's unsubstantiated
 allegation rather than what Bush is trying to communicate today -- something about education.
 This happens to people under pressure -- when they can't handle it.  Fleischer is one of the
 best in the business.  If the Bush high command is sending him out to peddle this kind of nonsense,
 it's a sure sign they're in over their head.

 Truth is, the media like Bush, and have protected him.  Almost no one picked up the first-rate
 Boston Globe investigation that proved Bush is lying when he says he fulfilled his duty in the
 National Guard.  The Globe interviewed everyone from the commanding officer of the Guard
 unit to which Bush was assigned (who says Bush never showed up) to the administrative officer
 of the Guard unit (who also says Bush never showed up).  The Globe also reviewed hundreds of
 pages of records, none of which contain any proof of Bush ever showing up for an entire year.

 In the face of all of that evidence -- and without offering a scrap of evidence to support him --
 Bush says, bald-faced, that he did show up.  And the national media buys it.  You never saw
 the story on the network news or in the New York Times.  The same with the story which
 AP broke suggesting Bush came dangerously close to insider trading: When Bush was a
 director of Harken Energy he sold a huge chunk of stock within weeks of a disastrous report
 on Harken's finances.  Bush later claimed he was unaware that bad news was on the horizon,
 yet he was not only a director, he was on the audit committee and served as a consultant to
 the company.  Chances are you haven't read that story in the national media either.

 So next time someone tells you the media is pro-Gore, try to stifle the guffaws.

 The latest map shows Gore at 356, Smirk at 182.
 
 

 (sniff...)

 Almost Famous

 First off, this movie is as good as they say it is.
 I can't remember a recent mainstream movie that had such universal,
 across-the-board great reviews as Almost Famous. They say it's as
 good as Jerry McGuire, but I've never seen that film.

 It'd been a while since we looked forward to seeing a movie this much.
 Not only was the obvious Led Zeppelin connection, but the whole rock n roll lifestyle was
 something we left behind in 1987 when the Hard Rock Island put me $40,000 in debt.
 I remember calling a lawyer asking him how I could file bankruptcy and he said,
 "First, you bring me $250."

 I couldn't come up with $250 in late 1987, so I never filed.

 So we had the Zeppelin thing, the lifestyle thing and then the let's-go-see-a-movie thing, too.
 The first thing that needs to be said about the movie is Kate Hudson is a star.

 I mean, how do you not fall in love?

 I fell the first minute I saw her.
 And it's not just a lust thing, the way ALL men make decisions.
 Sure, it'd be all kinds of fun to break the sixth and ninth Commandments with Kate Hudson.
 (There must be a special Hell for Catholics who lusted after Kate's mother in the sixties,
 Goldie Hawn, then 32 years later, lust after her daughter.)

 But I'm going past that and looking at the actress and the character she played.
 This woman can act.
 Great looking women are notoriously bad actresses.
 An actress like Michelle Pfeiffer is great to look at, but she can't act.
 Maryl Streep can act, but she's not that pretty.
 Kate Hudson is pretty and she can act.

 I don't guess she'll win the Oscar for "Penny Lane," because Hollywood likes to reward
 weirdo, Victorian-era movies with sub-titles that nobody ever saw besides Rex Reed,
 instead of a film the public pulled out their wallets by the millions to see.

 If you've seen the movie, you already know.
 There's lots of close-ups of her face in the movie, and when the camera is on her face
 and her eyes, you just get the feeling you're downloading her thoughts. Just staring at her,
 you get all these emotions from her that older, more experiences actresses can't give.
 How does she do that?

 All of the actors were good, and that's hard to do in a movie like this.
 They're playing pretend characters who are actually composites of characters Crowe
 met over the years. I suppose "Russell," (played by Billy Crudup) is a hunk, but I have
 no way to know. The band was a real band, playing songs written by Crowe and his wife
 and his sister-in-law. You may have heard their previous work in Heart.

 Part of the fun of the movie is picking out characters and scenes that we know happened,
 and how Crowe changed them to remain friends and still have an entertaining movie.
 For example - the band is mostly supposed to be Led Zeppelin, but there
 were many plot points that were from other bands.

 One plot point was the band's manager. He was seen as an ineffective doofus that was hired
 because he was the guitar player's buddy.  Zeppelin had the best manager ever, Peter Grant.
 Grant's genius and greed made the members of Zeppelin wildly rich from the very start.
 He also got them absolute control over their product, something no other band had at the time.
 No record company weasels (just kidding, Howie) telling them they needed to do a ballad,
 or a different album cover, or a duet with Cindy Lauper on the next album.

 Grant also changed the way rock concert money was divided. Before Grant, the band got half
 the concert revenue.  Zeppelin got 90 percent, so the "inept manager," may have belonged
 to Lynryd Skynyrd, the other major element of the composite. If the Beatles and Elvis had
 gotten great management like Zeppelin got, they could've gone places and had nice careers.
 To this day, if McCartney does, "Yesterday," in concert, he has to send a check to that
 most famous and strangest of alleged child-molesters, Michael Jackson.

 Back to the movie...
 The "golden god" reference you've seen in the previews was Robert Plant joking around
 on the balcony of their Atlanta hotel in 1973. In the movie, the guitar player goes to a party
 in Topeka, Kansas and eats enough LSD to make a dead elephant stand up.
 I really doubt Jimmy Page did that.

 Speaking of hotel stories, there are several great ones Crowe could've used.
 Once at the "Riot House," (The Continental Hyatt House on Sunset in LA)
 Zeppelin rented the top two floors. They brought Harleys up on the freight elevators
 and raced them up and down the halls of the Riot House causing much damage.
 Looking out their window over Sunset, they were outraged at seeing a giant billboard
 of their friend Rod Stewart. So what did they do?

 Each time they finished a bottle of Dom Perignon they'd throw the empty bottle
 at Rod's ugly face, raining broken glass down on Sunset Boulevard.
 Another famous prank was throwing the television from EACH ROOM out the window
 a la David Letterman, just to watch it crash many stories below.

 One semi-famous incident was when the hotel manager came to collect for the damages.
 He charged the band $300 for each TV, and there were, say 20 TVs on the street,
 so Danny Goldberg, (remember him kicking George Will's ass just 10 days ago?)
 stood there and counted out sixty hundred dollar bills to the hotel manager and asked
 if there were any hard feelings. The manager said no, and actually confessed that he
 always wanted to throw a TV out the window, himself.

 Goldberg peeled off three more Franklins and said, "Have one on us," and the manager
 threw a TV out the window of his own goddamn hotel!!
 That would've been a great addition to the film, don't you think?

 Also, the party scenes were painfully PG.
 The movie was rated "R," which doesn't make a lot of sense for a movie this tame.
 There was one second of an exposed breast, and I remember one scene where the
 groupies had "hand-rolled" cigarettes, but the movie really is all rock n roll and
 very, very little sex and drugs.  Why did this movie get an "R?"

 I was particularly impressed with the Lester Bangs character.
 I bought Creem and Kerrang in the mid-seventies - still have them, too.
 Bangs railed against the "machines" that ran rock n roll, and Crowe was very sympathetic
 to his character. Matter of fact, Crowe was very sympathetic to every character in the movie.
 There were no bad guys.

 Crowe's mother is a real trip, too.
 He never said, but she must've been Catholic.
 Knowing his mother was going to see the film, Crowe kept everything squeaky-clean.
 Koresh, the parties Crowe showed this band having were so damn tame compared to
 the fun we had after the band got offstage at The Hard Rock Island.

 The movie had a nice ending, but it was accidental.
 One character gets shamed into doing the right thing, which is odd because
 after getting "caught," the character tells us he already fixed things.
 I wonder why they didn't show that part in the movie?
 That would've been fun to see.

 I only caught two cameos:
 Peter Frampton is in the movie for about one second.
 By the time it registered who he was, he was gone.
 And at the end, when Crowe is going crazy trying to find a cab with Penny inside,
 he looks in a cab and sees Jann Werner, the real owner of Rolling Stone Magazine.

 By the way, another out-of-place scene was when the band found out they were going
 to be on the RS cover. In the movie, they're all very impressed and they spontaneously
 start singing  that horrid non-song made famous by Dr. Hook - in a public restaurant, no less.

 It was 1975 before Zeppelin ever made the cover of Rolling Stone, because RS hated
 Led Zeppelin's guts with a vengeance and secondly, RS wanted them to jump thru a
 bunch of hoops to get on the cover and Page/Plant told them to fuck off.
 As the years went by, RS gradually started to warm up to Zeppelin, so I doubt Robert
 and Jimmy started singing that horrid "buy five copies for my mother" crap when they
 heard they finally made the cover.  I'm sure the reaction from the real band was a
 slight yawn and a "big fucking deal."

 There was a scene where the guitar player gambled away Penny Lane (Kate)
 to Humble Pie in a poker game. This is partially a true story.
 In 1973, Zeppelin's plane was on the ground in Memphis.
 They found out Bad Company's plane was also at the Memphis airport,
 so they traded groupies. (Remember, this was before AIDS.)

 The movie also had a funny scene where the band thinks the plane is going to crash,
 so they all confess to wild shit. I can't think of "plane crash" without thinking of Skynyrd.
 I wonder if Crowe was on Skynryd's plane the night it went down in 1977?

 As the movie was drawing to a close, we were ready for it to end.
 Crowe did a great job of showing the monotony of the road, the changing girlfriends,
 the endless hotels, the in-fighting when the radio station or magazine just wants to talk
 with the singer and guitar player, leaving the drummer and bass player feeling left out.

 Even after the Hard Rock Island closed, we were good friends with this one great band
 you've never heard of called Bad Habit, who later became AKASHA.
 They were the best touring band in TX, NM, MS, OK in the late 80's.
 We never actually traveled with them, but we'd meet up with them in certain cities and
 joined their circus for the weekend. Seeing Almost Famous brought back those memories.

 Whenever they came to K-Drag or when we met them on the road somewhere,
 I always told them it was great to see them and great to see them go.
 It was so physically draining to be in the same town as them.

 We'd wake up from the party the night before when they did, which was usually around five
 in the afternoon. We'd cook some burgers for them, watch some TV and get ready for the gig.
 Then we'd start drinking, snorting, smoking before the gig, then drink the 5 hours they were
 on stage, and after that the real party would start. When they got off-stage at 2 AM,
 it was like 6 PM to you and me. So, we'd start the "serious" partying then.

 Since they were the best band touring at the time, the local bands all came to see them,
 and all the drug dealers showed up because they knew the house was going to be packed
 with customers and it was a special occasion.   There were the inevitable "club owner discounts,"
 so that furthered the bacchanalia to ridiculous heights.
 All that could be said afterwards was, "How weak the mortal frame."

 Good thing this was before camcorders and none of this is on tape.
 (cough!)

 So, as we left the theater, Mrs. BartCop and I felt drained.
 We loved the movie, but we were glad to see it end.

 Back then, in the eighties, it seemed like wilding was the right thing to do, and it was fun,
 but looking back sometimes I wonder what the point was.

 But don't let my wistfull flashbacks keep you from seeing this film. It's really a well-produced,
 interesting story. Maybe when it comes out on video, and it can be inspected with a pause button,
 more interesting details will jump out.

 I'd be interested to hear from you if you've seen the movie.
 Remember, when you write, always use the bartcop@bartcop.com address.

 Another thing Tony Blankly said Sunday made me think:

 He was whining about Gore calling for 30,000,000 barrels from the
 strategic oil reserves when he said, "One of Gore's big mistakes is thinking
 that the federal government should get involved in affecting the price of oil."

 I get the feeling from Tony that those are the words President Smirk would use
 to tell the northeast they were shit-outta-luck this winter if he gets elected.

 The Marconi Award

 Pigboy spent his first 30 minutes Monday bragging about winning that stupid
 Marconi Award for the third time.

 The only people that I've ever heard of winning it are the vulgar Pigboy,
 the LA She-Thing and the horse molester, Paul Harvey.

 To make things even worse, Brag-Boy spent the second hour telling us
 "there was a movement underway" to re-name this stupid, Nazi's-only award
 "The vulgar Pigboy Award," but Rush said he didn't feel right mentioning that.

 Hey, shit-for-brains, so why bring it up?

 As far as we know, this "movement," was started by a ass-kissing employee
 who KNEW you'd take the non-existent idea and run with it for an hour.
 Jesus, people worship this fake and fraud?

 People like Papax7 eat this horseshit up with a BIG spoon.
 This is how Rush got his reputation for "greatness."
 He TOLD the easily-led sheep he was great, and they bought it.

 Of course, they buy the invisible-man-in-the-sky who's ready to murder us and
 torture us for eternity if we don't worship Him enough, (yet, he looooooves us)
 so I think that says something about the mindset of those seeking faith.

 Seriously, have any non-Nazis ever won the Marconi Award?

 ...and darn the luck!

 When I got to work yesterday, the right-wingers said they heard the repeat of
 Patrick's val4522@hotmail.com phone call to Pigboy when he closed with, "visit bartcop.com"

 Damn!

 Butt,

 Rumors are someone we both know has a copy!
 I haven't checked my mail yet today, so cross your fingers.

 From:  Luckydog in France
 (Former vulgar Pigboy employee)

 Dear Bartcop,

 Just before I began to work for the  Pigboy my boss gave me me three criteria:
 1  no fat jokes,
 2  no Republican jokes &, knowing my political beliefs,
 3  no comments on the job BUT I wasn't sworn to not revealling hypocracy &
 vaudeville hamming on a level that supersedes the WWF
 ( I hope any Pigboy fans out there have their dictionaries out- what is
   their problem with spelling & diction anyway?)

 To cut to the chase I went to your buddies site with all the Pigboy audio(awesome)
 & found one clip with him talking about trailer trash:

 Here's the dope - He met his wife through a phone chat service (so now you know
 why he stammers & looks so sleepy) & they fell in love - her with his bucks
 (more about that later) & him with a bottle of peroxide in spray painted stretch jeans.

 ha ha
 Yes, more about the "bucks" and the spray painted stretch jeans!!

 And where did she live at that time ?
 IN A TRAILER HOME IN FLORIDA !!
 100% true.

 As you say- hypocrite liar..

 Yes he does have a walk in humidor FILLED with illegal CUBANOS, FILLED !!
 A good friend here in France asked me if I wasn't embarrassed to be American.
 (I'm  not American but I lived there 18 yrs) & I said why ?

 He said, "Look what they did  to Clinton & he's the best president you ever had.
 It was none of their business & now you have this Idiot running for President!!"

 I responded that I would be embarrased if I were a republican with morals as
 opposed to being a moralistic one of which I'm neither;.
 Anyway I'll send more if you want & tell more about Piggy & France if you want.

 Yes, send volumes on both, please.

 PS I'm working on a new record here & I would love some audio of smirk
 gaffes to make  an audio single(MP3)  & distribute it free !! ( ala Don Was'
 brilliant "Read my Lips") Where can I get some?

 Luckydog

 How about that, anyone?
 Anyone know where we can get some good Smirk audio clips?
 I have a few on this site, but they're .ram files, she probably needs MP3s.

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