4 posts tagged “top 20”

England’s Prince Albert was quite a trendsetter back in his day. Along with being an early proponent of piercing one’s junk, he also brought England the German tradition of hauling in a tree for the holidays and weighing its branches down with various chachkas. It is a tradition celebrated in the noodle-headed holiday favorite “O Tannenbaum”, which loosely translates as “I hope these pine needles don’t ruin my vacuum cleaner.” The tradition caught on and hacksaws have been roaring in wintry woods ever since.

Christmas is a time that tends to bring out the gauche and tasteless person within us all — there is no need to have all nine of Santa’s reindeer accounted for in your front-lawn tableaux. Here though we will focus on 20 items that surpass even the traditional standards of Xmas tacky. These are 20 Christmas ornaments that should not be hung on any Christmas tree that is not located in a home with rubber walls. So dump half a bottle of rum in the egg nog and take out the pruning shears as we run down our list of the Top 20 Crappiest Christmas Tree ornaments!

20) Bon Jovi: Putting this tuneless wonder on your Christmas tree is akin to admitting both that you hate music and are about as skilled at holiday decorating as the Jove-ster is at doing cover songs.

19) Dale Earnhardt pit crew ornament: A search for Nascar Christmas ornaments on Ebay brings up an unacceptably large number of hits. There are of course dozens devoted to that patron saint of stockcar Dale Earnhardt, but none of them stranger than this, a tribute to those guys whose job it is to change tires and put out fires. We never thought we’d find ourselves paraphrasing Jeff Foxworthy, but you can be certain you’re a red neck if you have one of these on your tree.

18) Phantom of the Opera ornament with lights and music: A good rule of thumb to go by when decorating your Christmas tree is that if an ornament requires batteries to operate, it is best left in its box. We were unable to find a video of this thing in action, but are certain there a few things less festive than an ornament celebrating a musical about a disfigured guy who lives with rats.

17) Golf Glove: Creativity was not the strong suit of whoever came up with this one. One for the geezers who fly to Florida to bat around golf balls every winter.

16) Mickey Mouse Shorts: The magic of Christmas. Bright-eyed little Johnny skips downstairs, his eyes twinkling with anticipation on the big day and what does he find hanging on the tree? A dismembered Mickey Mouse. Cue therapist in 30 years.

15) Gold Fortune Cookie: Highly auspicious, this little bauble will bring you good luck and remind you about that kung pao chicken growing fur in the bottom of your fridge.

14) Police Officer Set: A good one if you need a reminder of that cop who roughed you up and threw  you in the drunk tank last Christmas.

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Bon Jovi’s baffling popularity has continued unabated for two decades now, as this weekend’s Central Park concert shows, however in our minds, there is nobody more deserving of both a solid punt to the arse, or a safe dropped on them from a sufficient height, than these crap-rock poster boys, whose music is so middle of the road, their tour bus should have its own dedicated lane.

If only we could lace ‘em up and kick ‘em when they’re down, but they’re never down, churning out the same Springsteen-lite cacophony year after year.

To honor the band, and also in the spirit of celebrating the worst of everything, we’ve decided to put together a tribute, of sorts, to Bon Jovi, the world’s most famous Bruce Springsteen tribute band/wimp rock quartet.

Unlike some bands, the core group has remained relatively intact. This has enabled the Jersey boys with Swiss watch- like reliability, to consistently put out unspeakably awful music year after year.

The sole exception of course, the booting bass player Alec John Such (the ’soul’ of the group in that he sported soul patch facial hair), because he ‘couldn’t play his instrument’—a requirement obviously forgotten as few of the remaining members actually know how to play theirs (with the exception being David Bryan, the band’s keyboard player, who actually trained at the Juilliard School of Music, and judging by his current gig tickling the ivories with the Jersey dunder-heads, is about as overqualified as the ‘Ice Man’ Chuck Liddell doing security detail at a Girl Scouts Jamboree)

Their intrepid leader Jon Bon Jovi, of course, is Bruce Springsteen— if Bruce had a tin ear, Meg Ryan’s hairstylist, and penned gems like ‘Tomorrow’s getting harder make no mistake, Luck ain’t even lucky’ instead of great songs like Born to Run, Highway Patrolman or Thunder Road.

It is not hyperbole to say that BJ represents everything wrong with modern music, or at least, modern horticultural hair band music that became more bankrupt, creatively speaking, than Bear Stearns, and peaked around oh, 1987, unbeknownst to the band.

Bon Jovi is a church-basement rummage sale clearing house version of The Boss. Their ‘rock-lite’ is more sanitized than a trauma burn unit and their Forest Gump libretti induces more projectile vomiting than the elimination round at a chili eating contest. If this wasn’t enough, and from our vantage point here it certainly is, their news anchor bobs will guarantee they’re a shoe-in for the next installment of ‘Old Men who Look Like Lesbians’.

The only thing worse than an actual Bon Jovi song, however, is Bon Jovi doing a version of someone else’s, automatically better original. Worse still, would be someone actually COVERING a Bon Jovi song, but to the best of our knowledge, the likelihood of this occurring is about as probable as a meteor the size of the state of New Jersey striking the earth.

Since their own music wasn’t bad enough, here is Bon Jovi doing what they do best—spilling their own REO Speedwagon / Journey / Three Dog Night / Springsteen-lite effluent on some of the world’s most well-beloved songs. Luckily for all concerned, these are so popular that nobody would mistake them for Bon Jovi originals and mislead any future generations. Here, in no particular order, because the pork rendering plant stench emanating from each, is indistinguishable from the other, is our 10 Worst Bon Jovi Covers of All Time:

10. Save the Last Dance for Me, Pomus and Shuman. Among the ‘better’ song on this list, only in the sense that it’s better to have testicular cancer than say, lung.

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(Editor’s Note: The following blog appeared first on Cracked.com. To see it there, complete with welcome jab at Dr. Phil, click here. Below is the first part of the original submission. Part Two can be found here. Reader feedback on brands that we may have missed is as welcome as a free round… almost) :

For a booze-maker, giving your hooch the right name can mean success, even if you are hustling a product that could be put to better use in the gas tanks of a fuel-hungry nation. Malt liquors like Wild Irish Rose, Night Flight, and Schlitz fall into this category, but their respective names hearken to the splendor of the Irish countryside (or a prostitute in the Irish countryside named Rose, which is still not so bad), getting high in the evening/the adrenaline that comes from sprinting away from a crime scene, and, well, Schlitz doesn’t really signify anything but it seems like it would be a fine name to give one’s first-born son – “The proud parents are thrilled to welcome little Schlitz Rasmussen into the world”. Like putting a silk hat on a pig, it’s a way of sprucing up your product and fostering a loyalty that is completely divorced from product quality – in other words, the kind of loyalty that lasts.

Just as a catchy name with positive connotations can mean success for a product with “optimal serving conditions” listed as “best served in the general proximity of someone who drinks fast”, so too can a bad name sink the fortunes of a quality product. Many of the booze brand names below have been slapped onto products that judging by reports from beer and liquor snobs on the Internet sound pretty good, but we are not going to find out just how good because their names send us dangerously close to wanting to walk the line of sobriety.

It has become trendy among booze purveyors, particularly brewers and wineries these days to give their products deliberately jokey names like “Arrogant Bastard Ale” and “Wasatch Polygamy Porter” etc., but here we’ve stuck to those that sicken or repel consumers unintentionally for the most part (passing on Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout, however, was not an option). In some cases, these names sound terrible due to language or cultural differences; in others it’s a name that started off as perfectly acceptable but later become increasingly risible as the years passed and people looked for more words with which to form double entendres; and, in the majority of cases, it was a bad name to begin with and shit doesn’t turn to gold with age.

It’s last-call, the bar has been drained of all other brands, these names are presented to us on a menu, and we opt instead to do the unthinkable and flag down a taxi. There ought to be a law.

Sweetwater Happy Ending Imperial Stout

From Sweetwater Brewery in Atlanta, Georgia comes a beer that attempts to bottle the exotic allure of getting a five-fingered shuffle from someone who may or may not have found her way into her present place of employment as part of a barter deal for a Chevrolet.

What the Company Might Have Intended: The cartoon of the winking, cleavage-bearing sexpot masseuse on the label means this wasn’t a case of someone having failed to check out the urban dictionary before naming the beer. But the description on the label, “A huge, dry hopped stiffy, for a full figured beer, resulting in an explosive finish!” suggests that perhaps this was an attempt to celebrate the defining qualities of a good stout – full-bodied, satisfying with a pleasant aftertaste etc – in a way that would stand out on the shelves. That this quotation makes no grammatical sense may have been a play on the language difficulties that confront rub and tug patrons, or point to the need for a copy-checker at Sweetwater Breweries.

Why They Failed and Why We Want to Vomit: Beer companies often get a bum rap for glorifying alcohol abuse by producing commercials that show good looking young people having the time of their lives while in the general proximity of a crapload of their product. Someone living in a converted garage, drinking Miller Genuine Draft and spraying his shirts with deodorant so he doesn’t have to do a wash, might look at those Greek statues come to life in the Miller commercials, who seem to be preparing for a cabin orgy with the Swedish Bikini Natural 10 Extra-Beautiful Club, and think that he’s a few six-packs away from joining them. That same slob would have far less mental jogging to do to make the image that Sweetwater Happy Ending Massage conjures up a reality. Even more unappealing-sounding than “Hummer”, also put out by this same brewer, this one brings to mind the altogether unpleasant image of some naked horny fat guy in a towel overcoming a language barrier by counting off sums of money using his fingers and waving a stack of greasy low-denomination bills.

Deerstalker Scotch

From Scotland comes the perfect complement to a day spent skulking around a tranquil forest dressed up like a bush in the hopes of bagging Bambi.

What the Company Might Have Intended: A deerstalker is the kind of jaunty cap that Sherlock Holmes wears, and one that has also graced the fictitious heads of cynical low-life Holden Caulfield in “The Catcher in the Rye”, and portly truculent hotdog vendor Ignatius J. Reilly of “A Confederacy of Dunces”—lit personae you’d least like to emulate behaviorally or sartorially. In real life, most people who are able to tie their own shoes and for whom strangling by shoelaces is not a danger, don’t wear these hats. The exception, of course, are those for whom the hat is named – hunters out for a day’s drinking and shooting in the best tradition of American vice-presidents. They are presumably the target market for this whiskey.

Why They Failed and Why We Are Untying our Deerstalker Hats: This is not the whiskey to break out on a first date. First, it promotes headwear favored by those in cold climates who have severed all ties with mankind. Second, any reference to the slaughter of deer is unlikely to impress. Paired with the term “stalker”, showing up with a bottle of this falls between having BO and casually mentioning that you have a family of 10 “out there, somewhere” as a sure way to kill a date.

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At the risk of never being given the keys to the city of Crapo Maryland, where you might not to want to open anything anyway, namely a business, there are some places that are just plain unappealing to the ear—as opposed to say, the state of Indiana*, which is unappealing to each of the other senses as well.
[*Editor's note: It could be worse. It could be farther away from its main selling point---proximity to Chicago]

There are towns that for whatever reason struck ‘appeal to tourists’ off the local chamber of commerce agendas, watched the Rotarians rotate their wheels out of Dodge and whose mayors are currently in the process of decommissioning our welcome wagons.

These are places where a road sign pointing to them, even with the gas tank registering near empty, would have you lead foot it down the interstate and take your chances getting stranded somewhere while some maniac with a billhook muttering something about ‘city folk’ chops you into the next episode of CSI.

Now, at the risking of offending anyone outside Indiana state lines (a state so ugly it should be annexed, partitioned and sold off to the highest bidder–perhaps if a sultan in Bahrain needs somewhere to work out the finer points of his Ferrari’s 5-speed transmission) we should note that we’ve never actually been to any of the offending towns on account of never experiencing break pad trouble anywhere in their vicinity, (though one of us sped through Gary quite quickly) but we’re sure they’re all lovely places.

1. Dildo, Newfoundland The stagette gift that turns party-goers into short-form improvisational comedians, and if the party is held at an upper end restaurant will result in a board of health citation, this device is also the most embarrassing item that can be seized at customs (doubly so if you’re a man and with any sort of standing in the community, say the comptroller for Lizard Lick, NC)

2. Flushing, New York, Drain, Oregon Two names that refer to sending something through pipes, like say, E.coli through your intestines or a hole that attracts flies, these plumbing-themed dud names are a plunger and a snake away from causing serious water damage to your bathroom tiles and your psyche.

3. Bald Knob, Arkansas A particular sexual predilection detailed in the back pages of the Village Voice, or an insult hurled out the window at a chrome-dome trucker who cut you off.

4. Dead Horse, Alaska What more could we say about it without invoking the phrase? If your town is a ‘one horse’ one, better make sure the beast isn’t glue factory-bound.

5. Hellhole, Idaho / Hell, Michigan ‘Hell’ might mean bright in German, but these name choices aren’t. If Hell was at a lower latitude, instead of Michigan, at least in the summer it would lend itself to ‘It’s hotter than Hell”, “No it isn’t” repartee.

6. Crapo, Maryland Indeed.

7. Asbestos,Quebec Like Fleatown (below), don’t make any long term plans to stay. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the asbestos kitchen. Can explain the high absentee level due to incarceration/death at your next high school reunion.

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