I just finished watching season 2 of Luther over at Netflix, and this was the song played over the closing credits of the final episode. If you haven't seen Luther, I highly recommend it. Idris Elba plays the fearless and brilliant detective, John Luther, taking on London criminals that are so absurd in their extremes that they could have been ripped from the cheesiest of comic books. As any good show of these times, seemingly everyone is morally ambiguous, or compromised to one extent or another, although in the end, like any good cop show, the good guys win. Anyways, Luther is an extremely well-done and engaging crime drama that I cannot recommend enough.
Maneuver Roy Clark Sideways, Right There Between Felix & Oscar
Of course, when I think about country guitarists, I always think first of Roy Clark. Here he destroys a Flamenco tune called "Malaguena", which became perhaps his signature tune, in the same way "Sugarfoot Rag" was Junior Brown's calling card.
What makes this performance even more amazing is that he's playing a steel-stringed guitar when this song calls for nylon strings, a much more pliant and forgiving material.
And of course what seals the deal is that this from an episode of The Odd Couple.
Alison Brie plays Annie Edison, sexy nerd girl on NBC's Community, and it isn't hard to imagine her as younger Liz Lemon, which is to say Ms. Brie seems a younger Tina Fey to me.
I don't know if that's why she hopscotched over Ms. Fey into the #2 spot on my Laminated List this year, or if it's because none of this actually matters.
In an effort to shake things up on this year's Laminated List, I've decided to drop Tina Fey down to the #3 spot for no reason whatsoever. If you need a reason, let's say it's because she is currently 5-6 months pregnant, and quite frankly, pregnant women don't "do anything" for me.
If nothing else, it's a reminder that she's married to someone else, but more to the point, that this whole Laminated List thing is rather ridiculous.
Kat Dennings just turned 25 on Monday, so...Happy Birthday, Ms. Dennings!
I'm not sure if 25 is age-appropriate or not. She's young enough to be my daughter, and more to the point, she's at the age where I would have helped conceive her my freshman year of college. Thinking back to my Hazeltine House days, yeah, that definitely could have happened...
I suppose Kat Dennings is the bombshell on this year's Laminated List - the Reubenesque stunner with the big blue eyes, impossible to miss or ignore.
What's best, however, is that Ms. Dennings will be playing one of the two leads on a new sitcom called2 Broke Girls, premiering this fall on CBS. Considering CBS' success with sitcoms, I expect to get a weekly dose of Kat Dennings for several years to come. Will it be enough to keep her on this list of mine? Who knows.
Is it weird, or even creepy, that a middle-aged guy such as myself posts an annual Laminated List on this stupid, pointless blog of mine?
Would it help if I said I feel young? Would it help if I told you that three of the five women on my Laminated List are completely age-appropriate?
Connie Britton, for instance...She's 44 years old. Under completely different circumstances, we could have dated in high school.
As it stands, she's simply a gorgeous redhead playing what I believe is the best female character on network television (Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights), and giving one of the best performances as well. It's impossible not to adore and admire Tami Taylor, the no-nonsense high school guidance counselor, mother and wife of the school's football coach - the character I believe is the absolute center and anchor of the entire show. And human psychology, being what it is, it's difficult not to imagine that Connie Britton is a similar kind of awesome woman in real life.
Whether she is that kind of cool or not, I still find myself transfixed by her beauty, and with this being the final season of Friday Night Lights, an excellent TV drama that I'm sad to see going, I've been thinking more about her and her character these past couple of months, and I realized just how attracted I've been Connie Britton over the years, going all the way back to Spin City, which debuted in 1996.
This Laminated List, being what it is, will probably not include Ms. Britton next year, but for now, for 2011...
Epic With A Little Parmesan, A Little Oregano, A Little Red Pepper
The word "epic" is tossed around rather liberally these days, but Jon Stewart's takedown of Donald Trump whilst paying heartfelt homage to New York's pizza greatness is nothing short of EPIC (bold, all caps, italics). It is easily, hands-down, the funniest "thing" I've seen in a long, long, long time, and the kind of performance that wins an actor and a writing staff Emmys.
I apologize for the probable advert at the start of this embedded Hulu clip, but the 7+ minutes that follow are well worth the wait. The way Stewart slips effortless into his goomba "act", the way he lovingly and enthusiastically talks about great NYC pizzerias, the eating lesson, all the while blasting Trump (for pretty good reason, I'd say), it's absolutely epic. Completely over-the-top, and yet this is about authenticity and class.
And then the final shot at the end about citizenship, the twist that not only makes The Donald look even more inauthentic, but just plain foolish. It's a brilliant piece of comedy and a pretty high wire performance.
I'm not sure if I'm the first to make this observation, but Nick Offerman(Ron Swanson on Parks & Rec) has certainly got his shit together over the past 8 years. The man cleans up nicely.
BEST FILM: The Social Network BEST DIRECTOR: David Fincher, The Social Network BEST ACTOR: Colin Firth, The King's Speech BEST ACTRESS: Natalie Portman, Black Swan BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christian Bale, The Fighter BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:Melissa Leo, The Fighter BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Christopher Nolan, Inception BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network BEST FOREIGN FILM: Biutiful [Mexico] BEST DOCUMENTARY: Inside Job BEST ANIMATED FILM: Toy Story 3 BEST SCORE: The Social Network [Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross] BEST SONG: "I'll Rise", 127 Hours [Rahman, Dido, Armstrong] BEST CINEMATOGRAPHER: Matthew Libatique, Black Swan BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Colleen Atwood, Alice In Wonderland
Oh my! Melvins visit Pancake Mountain, and all hell breaks loose - karaoke challenges are made and met, with kids, puppets and three rather large and scary men all singing "I Wanna Be Sedated". Then the band lays down a little of their own brand of Punk with "The Kicking Machine".
01: R.E.M.: The Athens Demos: "Life & How To Live It" [mp3] Once more for the record - Fables Of The Reconstruction is my favorite album by my all-time sentimental favorite band, R.E.M. Capitol Records has just reissued Fables in a very deluxe kind of way, although once you move beyond the poster and postcards, and the packaging in general, one is left with a remastered version of the original album, and a second disc of demos from the sessions for the album. These demo recordings probably only hold interest for a serious and longtime fan like me, especially of this particular album, and the quality and progress of the songs are all over the place, but that only helps to illustrate just how great the Fables album ended up being. Producer Joe Boyd does an excellent job fashioning the moodiest album in REM's catalog, and the album that has come to best represent the "classic" R.E.M. of their IRS Records years, at least for me.
02: Lego Architecture: Seattle Space Needle: We're quite literally right in the middle of moving our offices over to the other side of town, into a smaller, but fancier, building. Since I'm one of only 4 people in the Operations Department, I've been busting my ass for the past two weeks, and will be busting my ass for a couple more. I'm going to miss the old place - for the last ten years we've had a fantastic view of Lake Mendota, and now, for at least the next five years, we'll be able to see the West Beltline Highway. Which is almost beside the point except to say that I bought myself this Lego model for my new workspace. I can see a Starbucks from there. I've never been to Starbucks, though I've been to Seattle three times, and I've been to the top of the Space Needle twice. Fuck, the West Beltline might as well be Omaha or Jacksonville.
03: The Good Guys [Fox, Mondays 9/8c]:Colin Hanks plays Jack Bailey, a cop as straight as his name, and he plays the character well, or at least wears the hairdo well. But he doesn't wear that square, lacquered hair as well as Bradley Whitford wears his moustache, which is my way of saying this is Whitford's show, and so far, he's doing alright. He plays Dan Stark, an aging, seemingly washed-up detective who still manages to show the guts and tenacity that made him a golden boy once upon a time for the Dallas PD. Of course, Dan Stark is a fool unafraid to rush into stupid, often unavoidable danger, and this is why The Good Guys is an Action-Comedy. Dan Stark has a lot of balls and just enough brains to be dangerous, and so far, Bradley Whitford is making the character come alive, and really carrying the show. For his part, Hanks is doing a solid job as Stark's straight-laced partner, Bailey, who's function, obviously, is keeping Stark's bravado in check. As actors, Hanks and Whitford play this typical good cop/loose cannon buddy cop dynamic well. Add the lovely and radiant Jenny Wade as Liz Traynor, an assistant DA with a "complicated" romantic past with Jack Bailey, and well, a show like this pretty much writes itself. A loud, funny and action-packed show that's currently eating up an hour of my life these past few weeks. Will it last? Will Whitford continue to make Dan Stark a brash and bold character worth watching? Ach, who fucking knows?
04: Wu-Tang Pizza: This one is pretty self-explanatory, I think. Black olives rule everything around me and those jalepenos ain' nuttin' ta fuck wit'.
05: 66 Mailboxes: I took this picture somewhere in Marin County, California, circa 1996. (As always, click to enlarge) I've counted 66 mailboxes, and I know there are more.
Kevin Godley and Lol Creme were the arty half of 10cc, and when they left that band in the late 70's, they continued as a duo. This song, "Cry", was their biggest commercial success, a leftfield hit in 1985, thanks to this video, which got insanely heavy airplay on MTV. Of course, if you check out their discography, you'll find that Godley & Creme were responsible for about fifty or sixty music videos in the heyday of MTV, being perhaps the most significant music video directors of that decade.
I'd go so far as making this generalization - these two dudes, who you probably never heard of, are largely responsible for MTV's success in their first decade, and without them, the network may very well not exist today.
Way back in May of 1998, when I moved back to Madison, some of my mail got lost/misplaced/delayed along the way, including that month's QPBC (Quality Paperback Book Club) catalog. The featured book in that particular issue was Infinite Jest... And because I didn't send back the order form with the appropriate box marked to inform QPBC that I did NOT want Infinite Jest automatically sent to me, they automatically did. And so I came home from work one day about two weeks after moving into this place only to find a fairly large cardboard box lodged between my doors. Before I had even unpacked the beast within, I was pretty damn sure I was never gonna read it. 1079 pages! If I didn't have the juice to conquer a tome like that when I was 32, you can bet yr ass I've got less juice now. Now...Now I could have simply sent the book back (free shipping) for a full refund, but I felt like the title of the book was the true jest for me - new city, new home, new job, new friends - a full-blown load of unknown. Twelve years later, and I can once again say Paul Simon is a prophet, because the more things change, the more they stay the same. Infinite Jest sits square in the center of my main bookcase in the living room, as it has for twelve years so far. I have read its spine countless times, every day. I've got my own ideas about God's sense of humor, the nature of fate, and the fortune of DNA, but don't ask me what this book's about. I'll never know.
Scanning Infinite Jest'scharacter list at Wikipedia, I'd have to say if they ever made this 5 pound book into a movie, maybe they could get TINA FEY to play Joelle Van Dyne § (aka "Madame Psychosis" aka "The Prettiest Girl Of All Time")...I'm willing to say Tina is crazy pretty, and sometimes pretty crazy. There's also the acid-scarred face of this character, and the scar on Ms. Fey's face to consider. Whatever. I'm 99% sure I'll never read David Foster Wallace's magnum opus...Alas, poor me.
§Joelle Van Dyne is the primary figure in the deadly Entertainment. ¶ In the work, which is filmed through a wobbly "neo-natal" lens, she is seen reaching down to the camera, as if it were in a bassinet, and apologizing profusely. This is said to trigger an addictive pleasure complex in the viewer, which makes even partial viewing of the Entertainment suicidal. She wears a veil to hide her face. She is a member of the "Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (U.H.I.D.)", she may be disfigured; based on an account by the unreliable Molly Notkin. It is not made clear throughout the novel whether in fact she is disfigured; she herself states that she wears the veil because every man who sees her flawless face falls in love with her. Although it becomes clear that she was indeed disfigured by an acid attack, it is possible that the acid attack post-dates her adoption of the veil. She tries to "eliminate her own map" (that is, commit suicide) in Molly Notkin's bathroom via massive ingestion of freebase cocaine, which lands her in the Ennet House as a resident. [1]
¶ The plot of Infinite Jest partially revolves around the missing master copy of a film cartridge, titled Infinite Jest and referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so entertaining to its viewers that they become lifeless, losing all interest in anything other than viewing the film. The video cartridge was the final work of film by James O. Incandenza before his microwave-induced suicide, completed during a stint of sobriety that was requested by the lead actress, Joelle. Quebec separatists are interested in acquiring a master, redistributable copy of the work to aid in acts of terrorism against the United States. The United States Office of Unspecified Services (USOUS) is seeking to intercept the master copy of the film in order to prevent mass dissemination and the destabilization of the Organization of North American Nations. Joelle and later Hal seek treatment for substance abuse problems at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and Marathe visits the rehabilitation center to pursue a lead on the master copy of the Entertainment §, tying the characters together. The text indicates that Hal and Gately dig up the grave of Himself (under the supervision of John N.R. Wayne) in search of the master copy. The novel ends in the Year of Glad (the first chapter of the novel), during which Hal's physical deterioration is made evident. [2]
§ Wallace's working title for Infinite Jest had been A Failed Entertainment. [3]
01: JAWS FFFUUUU: I was never a big fan of the FFFUUUU internet memethat began, as these things usually do, over at 4Chan. It's not the meme itself that I don't like, but rather its execution by most internet morans. But I do like this particular piece, which captures the essence of FFFUUUU so succintly, so brilliantly...Yeah, yeah, this is probably old and you've probably seen it already, but...
02: This Perpetual Teen strip I did a while ago wherein Rageman auditions for vocalist (naturally) of Kieth's band, Peppermint Dildo. And then Jack Cactus makes the scene. Dinger Jockey! Classic.
04: Gus Van Sant: Gerry [2002]: I watched Gus Van Sant's Death Trilogy completely out of order. Gerry was the first made, so naturally I watched it last. I'm not sure if it matters what order in which Van Sant's three films should be watched, as they're all different kinds of the same thing, death. Elephant concerns murder. Last Days is about suicide. Gerry explores what I'm calling "organic death" - literally a body's organs shutting down (nevermind the ending, because Gerry was dead long before he died). I suppose you could call it a "natural death" because nature is the cause of death in this film. My point is, there may be a million ways to die, but I'm of the belief that these three kinds (organic, murder, suicide) are the only three, into which those million ways can be categorized. If I believed in God, I suppose his hand would be the fourth, and Van Sant would have to make one of those four-part trilogies.
Like the other two death films, Gerry tells it's story mostly through visuals, and here there are long stretches of relative silence, the sounds of the desert, with short bursts of dialogue between the two Gerrys (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck), who get seriously lost while hiking in the desert. But mostly this film is about the beauty and grandeur of nature, and the scenes here are awash in pastel skies stretched over a rugged and jagged terrain, equal parts adventure and danger. As the film progresses, the situation becomes much more serious for the two Gerrys, much more bleak, and here, in the third day of their undoing, the last reel, we see them slowly and painfully shuffling across white salt flats like they might be walking on the moon, or maybe heaven. Despite the pace of the film, I found myself riveted. Like Elephant and Last Days (and life itself)we know the inevitable end of Gerry, and that pulled me along quite effectively. Van Sant once again handles the subject of death with a sort of grace and an even hand, without really passing judgement on characters in any of these films. Death happens. And once again, his secret weapon in Gerry is certainly cinematographer Harris Savides, who's shots linger and shimmer like dreams. I like.
05: Bill Griffith: Zippy: "Four Frame Game" [2000]: Comic stripping and death come together, and Mr. Toad explains the meaning of bowling. If I haven't mentioned this before, Zippy is my favorite comic strip of all time. Hmm...One of these days, maybe I should rank 'em...
06: Kingsford Charcoal Fascination: I've been seeing this commercial around the television lately. That song is Rob Crow's (Pinback) interpretation of "(Keep Feeling) Fascination" by The Human League. At first I wasn't sure how I felt about this, but then I figured "fuck it" - I thought the '80's were a great decade, "Fascination" included.
I've read Vineland, and The Crying Of Lot 49, and I kinda want to read Thomas Pynchon's newest novel, Inherent Vice, if I can work my way through this Lem Phase™ I've been travelling lately. I probably won't read Inherent Vice, actually, and I'm 94% certain I'll never finish reading Gravity's Rainbow. I read maybe the first 150 pages about 20 years ago, when I was in the last half of a 2 year relationship with a girl who I couldn't equate with any of the several hundred characters strafing through this maze of a place and a time before me, beyond me. Gravity's Rainbow mostly takes place at the end of WWII, and concerns Germany's V-2 rockets...Christina Hendricks is an eternal bombshell.
I really like William T Vollmann. I've read four of his books so far, books about prostitutes and drugs and murder and war and death and am right on the verge of diving into his Seven Dreams cycle of novels about the clash of Native Americans and European explorers and missionaries across North America, from Virginia to the Pacific Northwest, and up to the polar north. A heady, post-modern collage of fiction, history, journalism, mythology, fairy tales and legends. Vollmann has written four of the proposed seven volumes so far, and now seems like as good a time as any to get going. 4 volumes, 2500+ pages.
And counting...
Yeah, most of Vollmann's books are loooooong. He emerged on the literary scene at the age of 30 with his 700 page debut novel, You Bright And Risen Angels in1987,and in the 23 years since, he's written another 16 books, including the seven-volume, 3352 (!!!!!) page treatise about violence, Rising Up And Rising Down, in 2003.
Two years later in 2005, Vollmann published Europe Central, an 832 page National Book Award winner. Like so many of his books, Europe Central is a "sweeping" and "epic" story which brilliantly fuses fictions with history. In this instance, generations of countless characters living out their lives from Germany to Russia throughout the 20th century, against the backdrop of two world wars, the holocaust, fascism, communism, a cold war, and beyond...
Even if I happen to read my way through the entirety of the Seven Dreams cycle, which I admit is a long shot because I've also got a couple Stanislaw Lem books sitting here on the coffee table, and they're calling to me... "Polish sci-fi, Mohaski! You Polack!"
Anyways, I don't have the jam for Europe Central, even if I have the long-range Vollmann focus. Might as well laminate it.
That reminds me - Alison Brie plays the smart/cute/perky/uptight/annoying community college coed on, Annie Edison on the NBC sitcom Community. On that show she usually wears the kind of tight, colorful sweaters you might expect from a geeky rah-rah type who's never read Vollmann and has no idea who the fuck I am.
01: Ice Cube w/ The Roots: "Straight Outta Compton":Ice Cube appeared on Jimmy Fallon's show last week, and did the old NWA chestnut, "Straight Outta Compton" with The Roots. And it was goooooood.
02: Owen Pallett: "Game Of Pricks":The Onion's A.V. Clubhas been doing an ongoing feature called Undercover, in which contemporary bands do cover versions of older, more classic songs. In this week's installment, Owen Pallett(aka Final Fantasy) covers "Game Of Pricks" by Guided By Voices. It's a great rendition (love his voice) that really showcases Robert Pollard's knack for writing awesome melodies.
03: The Cat On The Silver Mountain: Not much needs to be said here - cats are fucking awesome, and this one's climbing a mountain.
04: Dunder-Mifflin floorplan: While The Office isn't quite as good as it used to be, it's still a quality show that delivers plenty of laughs. That doesn't matter though, because this is merely the floorplan for the Dunder-Mifflin office. I love floorplans. I wanted to be an architect when I was a teenager, but my math skills weren't good enough to get me into the program at UW-Milwaukee. Such is life.
05: Keebler Townhouse Flipsides: It's a pretzel shaped like a cracker! It's a cracker that looks and tastes like a pretzel! Will wonders ever cease? I've been putting cheddar cheese spread and sliced Manzanilla olives on 'em, and that's another wonder.
06: Jim's Pancakes: This is a website all about a guy named Jim who makes insanely awesome and inspiring pancakes for his daughter. Must be seen to be believed.
07: Hell's Kitchen [FOX, Tuesdays 8/7c]: I loathe reality shows. Just fucking hate 'em. Hell's Kitchen is the one exception. I believe I like this show because I've had several cooking jobs in my life, and I understand the dynamic of a working kitchen, and how the job is much, much harder and demanding than it might first appear. There's the heat, naturally, combined with the pace of a busy restaurant, that makes the job a bitch. Even with an able staff, there's always alot of different things going on at once, making one's timing perhaps as crucial as one's cooking skills. It's a very delicate balance that can get shot to hell in a heartbeat, and once that balance is gone, it's sooo hard to regain. One of the elements I like best about Hell's Kitchen is how the contestants brag about how great and skilled they are, which is ALWAYS followed by a segment showing them fucking things up royally, betraying their own egos and exposing their questionable skills. Seriously, I oftentimes think the producers pick some of these contestants just to humiliate them. Risotto and scallops are two mainstay dishes on the show, both being excellent barometers of the contestants skills, and almost every contestant who has appeared on Hell's Kitchen over it's seven seasons has fucked up both dishes. And then Chef Ramsay goes ballistic. I find this hilarious. People who have never worked in a kitchen think Chef Ramsay is an asshole. That's debatable, of course, but I can say that his demeanor is commonplace in the restaurant industry. Most chefs I've known and worked with over the years ARE assholes. I can't say that being a prick is a job requirement, but it is a high-stress job that tends to bring out the worst in people, and I just love when Chef Ramsay calls somebody a "useless donkey" or worse. Maybe it's nostalgia. Anyways, I consider myself a pretty good cook, but I don't think I'd fare very well on this show, so as moronic as I think most of the contestants are, I don't know if I could do any better under the circumstances.
01: Last Days [2005]: Writer and director Gus Van Sant goes out of his way to inform us that Last Days is NOT a Kurt Cobain biopic, but rather a "meditation on isolation, death and loss", but one only needs look at the poster to know this is mostly bullshit. Michael Pitt (as Blake, the protagonist of this film) has an uncanny resemblance to Cobain, helped in great part by the cinematography, in which we rarely see Blake close-up, and almost never see his face full-on. Instead, we see him stumbling around the large wooded estate surrounding his decaying "castle" in the woods, or shuffling aimlessly around the house, always on the verge of passing out. While we never actually see Blake doing drugs, the heroin use is certainly implied. Aside from the stumbling, Blake is nearly incapable of speech, and what does come out of his mouth is muffled and largely incoherent. Drugs or not, Blake is obviously a man with a serious, likely undiagnosed, mental illness. A mental illness that presumably doesn't matter to anybody else in the film because Blake is a huge rock star, and all those people around him have something to gain from his fame, whether it's bandmates needing him for a huge European tour and the wealth and fame it provides, his sycophantic housemates, who need him for money or lyrical help for their own songs for their own demo, or even the Yellow Pages salesman who simply needs another account, completely ignoring the near-catatonic Blake who sits across from him in the decrepit house. Yet somewhere beneath Blake's surface incoherence, it's quite obvious that he's aware of these leeches, because the entire film is really nothing more than a snapshot of Blake attempting to ignore, avoid, and escape them all, and when a friend brings a private eye hired by Blake's wife to find the rockstar, recently escaped from a drug rehap center, suddenly Blake doesn't stumble, but quickly and effectively escapes the house and evades the two. In the end, what Van Sant presents us is a portrait of a ghost, whether by choice or circumstance, who seemingly moves in a parallel world where everyone around him is incapable of seeing him for who he truly is, and more literally, often can't find him at all. It's a slow, haunting film, with little dialogue or plot, a strange audio track full of sounds that have absolutely nothing to do with what we see on the screen (ghosts, again), and even in the end, as the police stand over Blake's dead body in the greenhouse, one can't help but think he was gone long before he took his life.
02: Girl Eating Hotdog: Is it wrong that this photo turns me on? Yeah, it probably is.
03: Wolfguin: They can't fly, but they waddle rather fast. Long story short, you may want to laugh at the wolfguin, but once they clamp onto your leg, the joke's on you.
04: Whoomp! There Obama is!: The big question/conspiracy this week is that President Barack Obama appeared briefly in Tag Team's 1993 video for their hit, "Whoomp There It Is". True or not, the likeness is certainly uncanny, and I, for one, hope it's true.
05: Music & Lyrics by Stewie Griffin: I must admit, I don't like Family Guy all that much, but I happened to catch a syndicated rerun of this particular episode. "Things are a little more complicated than they seemed at first." Indeed, Stewie, life is often a stone-cold bitch, and yes, writing songs isn't very difficult, although writing good songs is something else entirely.
06: Milios' "Charlie The Tuna" Sub:Milios is a midwest-based sub shop chain, and aside from the absolute best French bread rolls I've ever had anywhere, their sub sandwiches are second to none. Now, usually I go with their Italian Club, but sometimes, as I did this past week, I opted for their Charlie The Tuna, which is most excellent for two reasons - Milios' secret gourmet sauce, and the fact that they don't use too much tuna. That might seem counter-intuitive, but think for a moment of a tuna sub that had too much tuna salad - it's dry, chewy, and ultimately, not very satisfying. The fine folks at Milios have found the exact right amount of tuna for their sandwich, and it makes all the difference. Just make sure to hold the bean sprouts. Sprouts suck.
Master orator, A-1 flirt, table tennis champion, world class lover, known slacker, sinistral minstrel, funky drum machiner, actual guitar hero, hungry freak, radio disc jockey extraordinaire, Pope of Discordia, advanced sloganeer, licensed coffee drinker, authorized cat fancier, snow globe juggler, ice skating judge, bonsai superstar, published poet with an unpublished number, understander of Jazz, leader of men, follower of my mom, Oracle database user, part-time billboard liberator, full-time Grand Marquis handler, accomplished pipe smoker, dental floss tycoon, fully-certified celebrity impersonator, dues-paying snake-handler, hyphen-minister, soft-spoken carrier of big sticks, amateur sleuth, semi-professional haberdasher, professional lifestyle consultant, chronic inhaler, retired bartender, grower of beards, psychic to the stars, Mint Spy agent, Friend Of Flat Atom, action figure model, stunt double, former paperboy, previous drunk, perpetual teen, and Nobel Prize winner in Theoretical Etymology. I'm also mighty handy with very large axes, extremely small firearms, celery salt, and Derrida texts. Possibly fake references available upon request.
