"Excuse me for a minute, let me play my guitar a little bit..."
Jimi Hendrix


Two months ago, I left a downtown Manhattan office late in the evening. It had been a long, stressful, creatively taxing day. My brain ached from trying to be clever for 11 hours.

The 3 Train rumbled through midtown. "You taking the express all the way uptown?" my co-worker asked. I thought for a moment. "No. I'm stopping at Times Square and going to play guitars at Manny's for a while. It'll make me feel better."

Browsing and playing rare/cool guitars serves as an antiseptic to the sore. That indescribable therapeutic quality of holding a Martin 000-15 in your hands and playing "Folsom County Prison Blues." Johnny Cash is musical Alka-Seltzer.

Up the subway steps, onto Broadway, left turn, 6 blocks north to 48th Street and hang a right. That's how you get to Manny's Music, the greatest guitar shop I have ever been in. As I walked, I was looking for the familiar green awning that marked the entrance to a musical museum with a helluva gift shop. Where is the green awning? Am I on the wrong street? Is this 47th? I walked right by the place. Not even realizing it. Turning around I saw the doors to the shop, but the green awning was gone. So was the Manny's sign. A new sign said "Sam Ash Guitars."

Something is not right. I stepped inside. It was much worse than I thought. In fact, it was a nightmare.

There's a little douchebag in all of us. So celebrate it.

Just in time for the holiday season, there's Douchebag Frames. A great gift for that dickish friend, asshole boss, stuck-up co-worker, or most annoying Contradictor.

They saym "Nothing says "you suck" quite like a Douchebag Frame."
And they may have a point.

Via AgencySpy

Microsoft is the kid in high school whose father made enough money to afford a kick-ass house, bought him a nice car, but when the kid threw a party, he ended up getting duct-taped to a pole in his own basement. And it's a shame because the company has done a lot for technology, to say nothing of the outstanding philanthropic endeavors of its founder. And I've been a vocal opponent of Microsoft's for years, but the time has come to give them some help. Microsoft needs to fix its reputation, and their recent attempts at hanging with the cool kids have only lead to more mockery. Microsoft, I'm here to help.

Granny gets down with the house music kids.
I hope she was just having fun and not lost on some alzheimer's related incident.

via ManOfest

'Tis the season to give stuff away! The kindly folks at AXE Hair have given us a bunch of their product, and we want to give it to you! However, we aren't going to simply hand it out. No, we want something in return. Something dirty...

We've all got secrets. Some are juicy, some are sinister, and most are dirty. You need to tell us yours. In the comments section below, submit your dirtiest secret, we'll vote on the best one, and that lucky reader will have enough hair product to make it cleanly through several months of depravity. (We'll be giving out AXE prizes to the 2nd and 3rd place finishers as well.) Let your stories fly in the comments section below. The deadline for submissions is next Tuesday, December 8th at Midnight, so get your dirt in before then.

50 years later, a home movie of Marilyn Monroe supposedly smoking a joint has made the web.

The reel-to-reel silent, color film taken at a private home in New Jersey was recently purchased by collector Keya Morgan for $275,000 from the person who took the film, who has asked to remain anonymous.

Morgan and the person who shot the film gave Reuters permission to use it in shortened form. The copyright of the image will be put up for sale on eBay later this week, Morgan said.

No doubt the film is valuable, but selling the copyright at this point seems a little like closing the barn door after the horses area all gone, don'tcha think?

Yeah, it's a parody of a song from twenty-four years ago, but it's still pretty funny. Maybe funny's not the right word... how about weird? creepy? odd? sad? stupid? OK, funny will do.