3 posts tagged “top ten lists”

In The Bucket List, Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson get out the blue box which has been attracting flies and recycle every character the duo have ever played in the last twenty years: the kindly, patriarchal, advice-dispensing gentleman and the cantankerous, wise-cracking cacker.

When diagnosed with terminal cancer, the twosome, sensing the scythed one is pulling into the driveway, decide to fulfill an ultimate ‘to do’ list. This appalling film, which might’ve put the careers of these two gentlemen into the earth as well, luckily, failed to make a dent in people’s enjoyment of lists of all stripes (the old advice-dispensing patriarchal black gentleman would certainly fit into a Top 20 Movie Clichés list). This is a good thing, as we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time writing Top This and That lists and would hate to think all that hard work might have been better spent doing something more socially constructive-organizing a parade or signing a petition to curb parade noise.

Since launching The Shark Guys in October of 2007, hot on the heels of our book, The Man Who Scared a Shark to Death and Other True Tales of Drunken Debauchery, we’ve arranged a good number of these hierarchies for your reading pleasure. These initially adhered to our book’s theme, drinking, such as our Top 10 ‘Bar’ Songs of All Time, but gradually branched into other areas as well. For those of you who haven’t suffered some kind of left-hemisphere trauma, you’ll note that some of these lists are reproduced in our site’s right column, but not all, so we figured we’d remedy that here. Now, as luck would have it, as of August 08, we’ve done 10 lists such lists. So here are our Top 10 List.

Top 10 ‘Bar’ Songs
We recognize that these songs played in bars make an important contribution to one’s elbow-tilting atmosphere, however, we reckon that enough attention has been paid to every one of them. What we’d like to focus on instead are songs that are actually set in bars. The writers of these songs, for the most part, were the sort who followed the advice of “Write what you know”; they looked around, saw that they were in a bar and wrote the following. [click here for more]

Top 10 Coolest Bartenders of All Time
Hollywood, not surprisingly, has introduced us to some truly memorable drunks – think Billy Bob Thornton in “Bad Santa”, or, far creepier and more likely to cause you to wake yourself up screaming, Gary Busey in “Carny”. But what of the men and women on the other side of the bar, patiently stomaching the hero’s bravado and slinging the drinks that fuel his adventures? [click here for more]

Top 10 Jesus Sightings of All Time
An English pub drinker had a religious experience of sorts recently. The Daily Mail reported on how a taxi driver ordered a bottle of cider and “got goose pimples” when the waitress opened it and staring back at him from the foil on the neck was the face of Christ himself. “His appearance at the British pub was only the latest stop on an unorthodox tour; the Nazarene has popped in for a visit via some unlikely, and occasionally delicious, places over the past few decades. [click here for more]

25 Horrible Bands Named after Places
Much like hypertension or obesity are predictors for cardiovascular disease, geography is a measure for determining whether a band’s music will make you want to cover your ears. Before you pen a terse letter to your city councillor, we’re not referring specifically to where a band might be from, but one whose name is geographic in origin. [click here for more]

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Before beer prices at stadiums got out of hand, and calling into question the virtue of the left-fielder’s mother became frowned upon, you could at times find one of us in the stands at a baseball game (perhaps, during its heyday here when the Blue Jays earned back to back World Series victories. The greatest Jay of all time, was the ass and karate kicking George Bell,).

These days, we hardly ever attend sporting events that aren’t dog-track related, but our memories of baseball, fading as they are due to the brain-shrinking effects of alcohol give us what we feel is the ideal perspective from which to point exactly what is wrong with the sport. It has been said by some observers of the game that baseball is duller than a thrift-store knife, while others have said “Zzzzz…” having already been put to sleep by a game. Being the altruistic sorts we are we’ve decided to share our views on how baseball can be fixed (literally, not in the Olympic boxing, Italian soccer and NBA sense of the term). These can even be implemented before the fat kid from Two and a Half Men or whoever, tosses out the first pitch of the World Series.  Here they are: (and R.I.P. to the late, great George Carlin)

1) Put the Manager in Civilian Clothes; Undoubtedly one of the most embarrassing things in all of sport is the fact that the baseball manager must wear his team’s uniform. No other sport has this convention. NBA coaches are not forced to put on the long shorts and muscle shirts, exposing their bleach-white legs and spindly arms. NHL coaches put on cheap suits instead of donning the team’s gear and doing pirouettes at center ice. Soccer coaches wear Canali and smoke on the sidelines. To each there own, we say, but this has got to stop.[FOR MORE CLICK HERE]

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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