Recently in lifestyle Category

For years, I've kept a mental list of celebrities, pseudo-celebrities and sort-of-famous people with whom I'd like to have a beer (read: get knackered) and some interesting conversation.

It's not about hotness or star-fucking. It's just about people I see onscreen or online or in the news that make make me go, 'hmm, I think I'd get along with him/her in real life, at least for a little while.' You know what I'm talking about; you just think they get it, or you get them, and that you could probably find a bunch of crap to talk about that has nothing to do with how much you liked their book or movie.

So here is the Top Ten from my Beer List, in some sort of order that's subject to change depending on the next thing any one of them says into a microphone. There are definitely a few more, but not many - famous people are generally wealthy, and wealthy people are generally vapid and irritating beyond reason - and most of the ones not on this list are already dead, making it really tough to bond over a shot of chilled Patron with an icy Modelo back.

Two more things, quickly: One, David Cross and John Swartzwelder are locked in a perennial tie for eleventh place on my Beer List, not because I wouldn't like to hang out with them, but because Cross probably has tons of idiots clamoring to buy him a drink and would just rather be left alone for a while, and Swartzwelder seems like he really doesn't want to hang out with anyone. And two, I know I'm lucky in the drinking partners life has already afforded me - I'd rather have a few off the wood with my fiance, friends, brother-in-law and the guys and girls of the Tampa/St. Petersburg music scene than anyone else in the world.

Click through for the list.

This week's good goes to having both superlative Pensacola pop-rock act Deadly Fists of Kung Fu and Tampa expatriates Joe Popp and Brian McCabe back in town for the weekend. Popp was in Tampa for a friend's wedding, and dragged the rest of the guys in his band The Hornrims down from New York City for a New World Brewery appearance; the Fists did that one too, as well as a Saturday night stint at St. Pete's Emerald Bar that included a Replacements cover, a money shower, and us bouncing some jerkoff in a Hawaiian shirt. (Look, dude, if you're going to threaten a girl, don't point at your cane and plead your limp when her male friends come over for a chat.)

This week's bad goes to bad family news. My mother will be having a fairly serious surgical procedure next week. She's a tough lady, though, and in pretty good health. Plus, they'll be doing that new minimally invasive thing where they just teleport the stuff out of her body through her bones and skin and stuff, or whatever. But if you could spare a thought for Mom Ravis, I'd certainly appreciate it.

This week's ugly goes to, oh, I don't know ... Speed Racer's confirmed flopness, I guess. Or no, wait - let's go with that whole thing about how the price of seeing crappy movies in the theater is going to go up even higher, because all the corn is getting used to make ethanol. Yeah, that's it; corn. Screw you, corn. If I still watched movies in the theater, there'd be trouble.

So the newest iteration of the Grand Theft Auto gaming franchise is upon us, and it comes with all the violence, immorality and indiscreet bonage we've come to expect. Also expected: The never-ending argument about whether or not fake violence begets real violence.

People like me, who revel in simulated gore, excessive cinematic violence, gratuitous boob action and vulgar one-liners we'd never say in public (as long as they're integral to the plot or character development, naturally), but who would never actually go out to kill, skin and bugger a wino, insist that those things don't negatively influence culture in real life. We call it cathartic. We claim that it actually sublimates our more barbaric lizard-brain instincts; it's a harmless outlet.

On the other side of the argument are a bunch of the people that people like me tend to not like very much anyway - nosy, religious, well-to-do (read: often, white and insufferable) people who are deathly afraid of crimes that are rarely committed against them. They're the sort of people who, when entreating us to think of the children, are rarely thinking of their own children specifically, but are canny enough to know that every once in a while, one or two of those boarding-school kids get their wires crossed and make an awful mess. They say that the culture is eroding family values, that God is the answer, that the movies and the TV shows and the video games are encouraging a culture of selfishness and sociopathy.

And they're right about the last thing. But the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the middle. And if people of all races and social strata would stop producing such easily influenced, selfish, sociopathic, dumb-assed kids to begin with, maybe I could enjoy and then forget a Saw sequel without having to consider its sociological ramifications.

So, several months ago, I forsook (is that right?) filtered, prepackaged smokes in favor of rolling my own. I had several reasons for doing so, none of which had to do with affectation. (Tip for the kids, at my age, you don't look like the angry anti-corporate loner polluting your lungs with non-corporate carcinogens, you're just another old man at the bar with a weird pouch and a ritual.) Like that time on Friends when Joey had Chandler get into the box, my reasons were threefold:

Expense. Hey, I'm getting married in a bit, which means I need to squeeze every penny. (Read: My groomsmen might be paying for my flight to Vegas, but I'm going to have to lose my own money at the roulette table. Also, there are centerpieces to pay for, or something.) And a tin of tobacco lasts me twice as long as a carton of smokes, at half the price.

Flavor. Contrary to what visual logic and that time you had a Pall Mall might tell you, home-rolled tobacco is a smoother and lighter-tasting smoke than Marlboros. I don't know if it's the dreaded Big Tobacco additives or what, but an unfiltered Drum or Bali Shag smoke weighs less heavily on these veteran lungs than your average top-notch brand.

I'm going to quit, I swear. Smoking home-rolled cigs means smoking less. I'm not yet ready to quit altogether - though that's the goal - but I'm smoking, like, ten thin, delicious, retarded-looking coffin nails a day. And I'm splitting cigarettes up over the course of the day. It beats jogging.

There have been drawbacks, however. And they're really fucking irritating.