What?! Free joints but no munchies!? F**k the government!

An article in the New York Times discussed about the move in Washington State to offer free Covid vaccine injections from various marijuana dispensaries in a so-called “Joints for jabs” program. Along with that, they would offer free joints, but stopped short of offering “edibles”. The Times article is not clear on this last part — they probably mean edible cannabis-infused products. They could have also meant Doritos or pizza, the standard go-to foods when a stoner gets the munchies. Not to be confused with cannabis-infused pizza, which would make things worse.

 

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Nuts with guts: Crazy iPhone lady

Caught a vid of a nutty lady with a cell phone railing against cell phones. Going by the palm trees, I guess this is likely California, where being a wingnut is socially acceptable.

The basic schtick appears to be: don’t be seduced by technology, they’re taking over your brain! I feel sorry for her in a way. She does have a point. I take her point to be for us not to be slaves to technology. Tell the kids to turn the cell phone off. Go outside and play. Get on your bicycle, your skateboard; play catch. Chat with each other face-to-face.

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Crappy album Covers #120 — Plastic Surgery Disasters

Album_Cover_Crap_177_Flickr Just before work ended, there was this explosion at the Red Rubber Coating factory, and this poor fella couldn’t escape in time.  This is Tripping Daisy’s 1995 offering, called “I Am An Elastic Firecracker.”

What seems a little more worrisome is the skin tone of the fellow underneath the read paint.

Album_Cover_Crap_176_Flickr This is the 1991 single from Aphex Twin, called Window Licker. Aphex Twin is the brainchild of Richard James, a Welsh artist who has been making records since 1991.

My experience with AT is that there is not much about them that is danceable, but this one has its moments. The video generally centers around the theme of picking up whores in some undisclosed location.

I couldn’t understand the first part of the video. It seems that for about the first 2-3 minutes the dilogue cosnsisted of two coloured guys in a car repeating the word motherf***er over and over with a few extra words thrown in to make it sound like they were speaking English to each other. When the prostitutes were encountered, the words varied a little more, but the hoes saw through them, and didn’t believe that they had any money.

The tranny groove on this single comes from something that happens part way thru the video where the second customer, who is of the sort that drives a stretch limo with a bazillion windows (namely, our hero Richard), gets out of the car and starts some kind of a mating dance requiring a suggestive use of an umbrella. That’s when the prostitutes start growing beards, and looking like Richard. Creepy.

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Crappy Album Covers #116 — Banarne-Rama!

Album_Cover_Crap_194_Flickr Swedish children’s entertainers Trazan and Banarne are at it again with another two records depicting a kind of  Trazan character who looks like Curious George Harrisson; and a scary looking primate called Banarne. 

Where do they find a restaurant with silverware and fine crystal in the jungle? Also, being a jungle, there would be no need of a fake potted fern when real ones are likely plentiful.

Album_Cover_Crap_193_Flickr Just to show that no animals were killed in the making of  this children’s show, Trazan and Banarne reveal themselves to be vegetarians, with their meal consisting of  a watermelon split: a half watermelon with cream on top, with cherries, pineapple and banana garnish. 

So, this means they are not strict vegetarians.

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Crappy Album Covers #46 — Fugly people

album-cover-crap-1_lurch_lp-cover-loverOK. I’m being unfair. Lurch was already ugly. We expect him to be ugly, and he plays the part. We watched the Addams Family series when we were kids because of all the ugly characters, and all of the strange ways that were totally unlike a normal family.

Ted Cassidy played a Frankenstein-like character called Lurch in the series the Addams Family, back in the days when color television was just starting. But we were lucky in our family. We still had a black-and-white TV, which is really the only proper way to watch the Addams Family.

In black-and-white, Morticia had cigarette-white skin and looked like death warmed over, for example. Color invites the danger of adding flesh tones, which ruins the “undead” effect, which I think lies at the heart of the whole Addams Family atmosphere they were trying to get across.

A Morticia that is more lifelike? A Fester that doesn’t look like he was carved out of soapstone? A Lurch that is not gray-faced, and that doesn’t look like he forgot to take his meds? What’s the point?

album-cover-crap-23_lp-cover-lover

It’s perfectly OK to love your mother, I suppose. Heino has taken this to its ultimate futility, it seems, with this offering, called “Liebe Mutter”, or “Dear Mother”, as I believe it is translated.

Heino has, like many albums I have here, have been a staple of crappy album cover blogs. But this time, rather than have widespread photoshopping of Heino or the rest of the album (which may well have really happened), a website called “faceinhole.com” has a concept where they provide a photo with the face already covered in “transparent” pixels so that you can plop any face you like  in place of folks like Heino.

So, my choice of face was that of George W. Bush. He has had his issues, but they may not have been principally maternal in nature. But what the hell…

gbush_liebemutter
Create your own FACEinHOLE

Yeah, I admit it’s a hack job. But that is kind of like Bush’s presidency.

The glasses weren’t pixeled out, so I had some time trying to fit Bush’s eyes inside the glasses.

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album-cover-crap-7_lp-cover-lover1Fred Emney (1900-1980) just wants you to buy his record then f**k off.

He was a British comedian, playing a gruff, fat bloke wearing a monacle, just as he is depicted here for his fans. As part of his act, he often played his own piano compositions.

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album-cover-crap-24_lp-cover-loverSome people you would rather see fully clothed.  Liz Lyons is a comedian, whom I would guess was into a bawdier kind of humour than normal. For 1975.

LPcoverlover.com reports that this 1975 album had reviews on the back cover which said things like: “When this kitten lays one on you, you know you’ve been laid…on” and “I laughed so hard I fell off my wife and broke my arm.”

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album-cover-crap-22_lp-cover-loverThis single by The Hendersons has been traced back to 1981.

Now, photoshop wasn’t created until the early 1990s. So, this cover came about due to good old-fashioned photo retouching of the kind that framed Oswald in the Kennedy assassination.

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Crappy Album Covers #45 — Teenagers

Teenagers are a difficult demographic to reach, unless you don’t know anything about them. If you know nothing about the demographic, then it does’t pose a difficulty for you. I know that’s kind of like saying that if you don’t know anything about painting a portrait, then slashing the brush in any direction or color at random poses no problem to the painter. It seems that way, with the covers below. If your album overtly suggests that “This album is for teenagers”, I will guarantee you teens won’t buy them. On the other hand, if you say this is “R-rated”, and contains cuss words and sexual suggestions that would put a blush on a two-dollar hooker (you know, like Rap), and that young people shouldn’t buy them at all, then they will fly off the shelves and teens would be the biggest part of the market.

album-cover-crap-19_bizarrerecords_comCase in point, this realistic portrait of teenagers having a good time. I bet you already knew they were listening to this very record, recorded by Bobby Krane and His Orchestra, and distributed by Bravo! Records.

Look! The young lady in the foreground is saying it too! — Bravo! Bravo! At least that looks like what she could be saying.

Look at the photo and indulge in the fantasy that there is still a world where young teen girls don’t dress like sluts; the guys stay straight and sober (by “straight” I meant drug-free, but I guess it could also be taken the other way) and don’t dress like plumber-butt pimps. And the guys even ask the girls “may I have this dance with you?”

And then there’s Tex Ritter. Tex Ritter? And that’s when I woke up.

album-cover-crap-20_bizarrerecords_comThe TOPS record label, which previously warned us about the world ending, are shown here producing records of “12 Top Hits” so you can party like it’s 1999, or more to the point, like it’s 1959.

You have to admit that the one thing that stands out most about this cover is that the lady who is dancing is wearing argyle socks. I thought there was a law passed by Joe McCarthy’s HUAC banning women from wearing argyle socks. It was supposed to be a guy thing. It totally clashes with the pink blouse.  If this is a fashion statement, then she should be arrested by the fashion police for bad fashion grammar.

Once again, the cover consists of the tamest teenagers you’ve never seen. And I don’t think they existed in 1959 either. Even in 1959, teens got drunk, and they had sex. Perhaps the only worthwhile thing that the photo realistically illustrates, is that in 1959, the guys didn’t have the bad taste to wear plumber-butt pants or hoodies, which would have made the chick in argyle look like Elizabeth Taylor (I mean Liz Taylor in 1959, not in 2008).

To anyone born after the 1960s: HUAC = “House Un-American Activities Committee“. It’s sort of like Homeland Security against commies and hippies.

album-cover-crap-18_lp-cover-loverThese seemingly adult-age folks may as well be adolescent, since they are depicted in the way their parents would approve. “I Love Music” was a sampler sent to radio stations across North America from Capitol Records back in 1958. The album cover gives every indication that the HUAC would have approved of this album. Going by the cover, for instance, it is obvious that these two folks are not planning the overthrow of the proletariat, and of taking over the means of production.

The artlessness of these depictions are a sure symptom of the McCarthy era. I recall when I began collecting old issues of Mad Magazine (digested in paperback form) going back to the 1950s, the most boring and least funny issues were during the period of 1958-1963. It couldn’t have been a good time to be a satirist.

And there was one more I forgot to add:
tammy_casual-slack-080726Yes, this 12″ LP of hits, which by the cover seems to treat teenagers as younger than they really are, may not have been headed for any kind of landmark success.

A toy doll with a toy record goes to a toy jukebox to pretend to play music on it. And, what’s left? You can only sing along to the music you are pretending to play.

I must say that much of the advertising I see today parallels the kind of mentality depicted on all of these albums in today’s blog. There is a certain advertising these days that points to a certain clientele, or a certain lifestyle as we would like to see it. But it is made to look artsy, so that you can’t accuse advertisers of appealing to people that don’t really exist. Instead, it can look naive, even idealistically so.  Sticking to album covers, the Putumayo Collection, discussed earlier, is an example of album covers that are like this.

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