Four good songs with prominent guiro parts

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The guiro is a Puerto Rican percussion instrument shaped like a fish. Here are four good songs with prominent guiro parts, for you to enjoy this snowy morning:

4) CAKE — “Short Skirt Long Jacket.”

The band CAKE has done as much for auxiliary percussion as any musical outfit of the past 20 years. For this reason, among others, they are one of my favorite bands. They have many songs that feature the guiro; this is only the best-known guiro-featuring CAKE song.

3) Tone Loc — “Wild Thing”

Tone Loc’s contribution to great guiro music is reasonably subtle, which is in direct contrast to pretty much everything else Tone Loc has ever done. You may know Tone Loc from completely Yadier Molinaing Keanu Reeves in Rock n’ Jock softball game, from his not doing nearly enough stuff, and, of course, from his star turn as Emilio in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. The guiro part is brief and doesn’t come until pretty late in the song:

2) David Bowie — “The Man Who Sold the World.”

Most people know this song the Nirvana cover on Unplugged, which is itself pretty sweet and true to the original in almost every aspect besides reverb and guiro-presence. And man, how present a guiro. It dominates the left channel of the track, featuring classic guiro rhythm. ||: Chk-chk-trrrrah, chk-chk-trrrah :l|

1) Rolling Stones — “Gimme Shelter”

This is just an awesome song all around, its greatness only amplified by its clear standing as the exemplar of rock and roll guiro incorporation. Maybe my favorite Stones song.

Celebrity list

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Drew Magary at Deadspin suggested everyone keep a running tally of celebrities they have seen outside of usual celebrity settings. Bobby Big Wheel followed suit, and since there’s not much to do but whine about the weather this morning, here’s what I’ve got. Obviously this doesn’t include concerts and stuff, and I’m excluding athletes because I see a lot of them in this job.

– Julianne Moore in a Starbucks in Chelsea.

– Heather Graham in a restaurant across the street from that Starbucks in Chelsea.

– Ludacris, walking right past my cubicle at MLB.com. I still have no idea why.

– Method Man, going into my favorite wing place in Brooklyn.

– Dan Patrick (does he count?), at a bar in Murray Hill.

– Carver from The Wire — at least I’m pretty sure — at Citi Field.

– Ralph Nader, walking alone down K St. in DC.

– Maggie Gyllenhaal in Gorilla Coffee in Brooklyn.

– Blair Underwood, on 5th Ave.

– Mike Myers, three different times, every time walking around the village alone with his iPod on.

– Matt Walsh from the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and small parts in like a billion movies and TV shows, when we both auditioned for the same Burger King commercial, and then again in the Ranch 1 across the street from the casting agency immediately thereafter.

– Rudy Giuliani, getting out of a livery car on 53rd St.

– George Pataki, in the lobby of my current office building.

– Eliot Spitzer, on 5th Ave.

– Philip Seymour Hoffman, across from the Brooklyn Museum.

– John Turturro, twice, once with a funny story: My girlfriend (now wife) and I were walking down Union St. in Brooklyn and Turturro walked right past us. I got all excited. “That was John Turturro!” And it turned out she had heard his name but had no idea who that was — she’s not so tapped in to pop-culture stuff. So I started listing like everything he did to try to jog her memory. He was Jesus in Big Lebowski, one of the dudes in Do the Right Thing. He was Barton Fink in Barton Fink, and he was one of the two not-George Clooney guys in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Nothing. She had seen a bunch of those movies but couldn’t identify Turturro in any of them. Later, we were in the bodega across the street from my apartment looking for Swiss Miss. The guy at the counter pointed us in the general direction but we couldn’t find it. While we were searching, the little 10-year-old son of the family that owned the place popped up behind us (holding the Swiss Miss) and scared the crap out of us.

As we were leaving, she says — I swear on my life — “He just snuck up on me, like the butler from Mr. Deeds!”

– The other funny celebrity sighting story: My friend Matt is one of the most conservative people I know (not politically necessarily, I just mean in terms of dress, behavior, everything else). He lived on my floor freshman year of college, and for the first several weeks I thought he was the dorm chaplain. Really nice guy, and just perpetually polite and respectful and dignified, like way moreso than anyone else I ever hang out with.

Anyway, we’re leaving a movie at the Sunshine down on Houston St. about five years ago, and he stops in his tracks, points at a woman crossing Houston about 15 yards in front of us, and quite nearly yells, “OH MY GOD LOOK AT THAT GIRL’S ASS!”

It was so unlike him in every way that I had to muster up the strength to heed his command, and indeed, the backside was a sight to behold. “She has to be famous,” he said. “She has to be.” This was not the ass of a civilian.

Since we were behind her and walking north anyway, we followed her up 1st Ave. until she got into the back of an SUV and drove off. Jessica Simpson.

Curtis Granderson eats various sausages

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Granderson does a pretty good job eating and describing these sausages, and I am intrigued by the corn dog with the sauce already inside the corn batter. I am skeptical, though, that a non-deep-fried corn dog could hold up to the high standards I have for corn dogs*.

What’s most disappointing about the video is that he doesn’t sample the Swirldog, which is advertised right in front of his face. It’s hard to make it out but it looks like the sign says, “A sausage with a twist that sends all others green with envy!”

That doesn’t even make sense, but it makes me want to eat it for sure. WHAT’S THE TWIST?

*- I wrote something about corn dogs in a Live Journal post in 2004 that I still think is kind of funny. For some reason I used to have a thing for purple Fruit Stripe gum. I don’t want to link to that site because rather profane, so I’ll just excerpt the important part here:

I had a corn dog today; I got it from a guy selling them on a street corner. Imagine that — the corn dog man. It seems like five years ago when I came into the city, it was strictly a hot dog/pretzel/knish thing. Now they’ve got everything on the street corner. It’s like, “Hey, I’m going down to the corner to pick up something from the Lobster guy, you want anything?” “Nah, I got food from the 16-Ounce Porterhouse Steak cart earlier.”

Anyway corn dogs are [expletive] awesome. I like how there’s an element of mystery to them. Like you can’t see the meat, so you really don’t know what’s in there ’til you bite it. And hot dogs are pretty sketchy as far as meat goes to begin with, so you’re really taking your chances biting into that corn dog. But it’s worth the risk. A good corn dog is about as rewarding a food as you’re going to find this side of purple Fruit Stripe gum.

I think it has something to do with the meat being on a stick. There’s something very primal about eating meat on a stick, something that harkens back to medievil days when knights would come galloping into the castle only to be rewarded with huge hunks of meat on sticks. I think this might explain my affinity for shish kebab as well. I hate veggie kebab. Sissies.

Write this down: When I die, I don’t want to be buried or cremated or put into one of those Native American spiritual mounds, which I guess counts as buried except that you’re technically above ground. I want to be battered in corn meal and deep fried. Ram a stick up my [expletive], too, if need be. That way, everyone who comes to my wake will be forced to make the same decision I made today before biting into my corn dog. “He looks delicious… shall I bite him?”

Yes, eat of me what you want, I’m a delicious corn-dog cadaver.

Just how awesome will R.A. Dickey be?

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After the coming out party that was last season, expecting him to come back to Earth would be extremely reasonable, akin to a rookie whom the rest of the league had finally gotten a winter to read the scouting report on. But R.A. Dickey is no rookie.

He is, despite his relatively brief time in the Majors, a mature pitcher. Having started his career as a power thrower who converted only because of a missing ligament in his arm, he has become adept at evolving to keep ahead of the hitters. He changes speeds, with knuckleballs that can vary within a 15-20 MPH range and throwing an occasional fastball that still peaks in the 80’s. Most important to his development is that he believes that he is still learning his pitch, that there are more changes he can make to improve his game. He feels that teams won’t have a full scouting report on him because he is not done writing it yet.

– Kieran Flemming, Mets Fever.

We know R.A. Dickey’s going to be awesome in 2011 because he’s presumably still going to be throwing knuckleballs and reading Faulkner and using big words in postgame interviews and everything else. And all those things are cool. But just how awesome can we expect R.A. Dickey to be?

Flemming argues that we shouldn’t expect a so-called “sophomore slump” from Dickey because he’s a mature pitcher willing to adjust his game, and perhaps that’s reasonable.

But will Dickey regress toward the mean? Was he perhaps the beneficiary of some good luck and did he pitch a bit above his head last season? It’s hard to say because Dickey is an outlier in so many ways. He has been getting progressively better since becoming a full-time knuckleballer, and he throws the hardest knuckleball I’ve ever seen — and mixes speeds with it.

Still, baseball is a game of perpetual adjustment. Certainly next season opposing hitters will have more experience against and more video of Dickey, and more knowledge of his tendencies, and Dickey will have to adjust in turn. But it doesn’t seem at all likely to me that he’ll continue pitching at the level he did last season.

Again, I have no solid evidence upon which to base that, just the knowledge that a 138 ERA+ at the Major League level is really, really difficult to sustain. For what it’s worth, Tim Wakefield threw 13 awesome starts for the Pirates when he first came up in 1992 and then enjoyed a career year when he first switched leagues in 1995, and both times he regressed thereafter.

That doesn’t mean Dickey won’t be useful or valuable or awesome, of course.

Where’s the beef?

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Terrible puns aside, the case Beasley Allen of Montgomery, Ala. brings up is a pretty interesting one, as reported by WTOL in Toledo. Beasley says that what Taco Bells calls “ground beef” does not meet the USDA’s definition of beef — “flesh of cattle” — and should instead be dubbed “taco meat filling.”

The suit claims that Taco Bell’s meat-like offering is filled with extenders and other non-meat substances listed in the lawsuit like water, “Isolated Oat Product,” wheat oats, soy lecithin, maltodrextrin, anti-dusting agent, autolyzed yeast extract, modified corn starch and sodium phosphate as well as beef and seasonings. Yum!

As the USDA definition in the lawsuit says, to be called “ground beef,” the product must “consist of chopped fresh and/or frozen beef with or without seasoning and without the addition of beef fat as such, shall not contain more than 30 percent fat, and shall not contain added water, phosphates, binders, or extenders.”

– MB Quirk, Consumerist.

OK, if you’re one of the 20-some people that tipped me off to this story, thanks and I appreciate it. But the shoutout here has to go to our guy Deez, fan of the site but no fan of Taco Bell.

Here’s the thing: Whatever the stuff is that’s inside those “ground beef” tacos tastes good. Yeah, I suppose it’s a little bit gross or weird or at the very least unbecoming to learn that it is allegedly not all meat. But it’s not like I’ve ever gone to Taco Bell thinking, “I’ve come for some healthy food that does not at all contain additives or preservatives or vague chemically sounding elements. I’m not here for the flavor, I’m here for the grass-fed beef.”

I mean it costs 89 cents! That’s practically free! You should be thrilled that you even get a corn tortilla with shredded lettuce and cheese-like product for that price, not to mention all the free packets of sauce-style substance you can handle.

I will go to my grave — yeah, perhaps sooner than later — apologizing for Taco Bell. I can’t imagine any true Taco Bell enthusiast is going to be too broken up about this news. I do wonder, though, how it affects Seasoned Beef’s role in the Super Delicious Ingredient Force.