The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Every now and again, I have a day that starts like this.

This is what I imagine my friend John Bristowe, who moved to Australia (where all the creatures are deadly), has to put up with every morning.

Found via AcidCow. Click to see the source.

The placement of the boxes doesn’t help. In case you were thinking that the labels were Photoshopped, allow me to show you the images from the Walmart.com pages for the two kiddie cars shown above. Here’s the SRT Viper…

Image from Walmart.com. Click to see the source.

…and here’s the police cruiser…

Image from Walmart.com. Click to see the source.

On the other hand, the Fisher-Price toy Escalade looks like the racial harmony kiddie car:

Image from Walmart.com. Click to see the source.

Now that’s what I call an answer:

But seriously, He probably knows a good site or two:

“xHamster.com, my child, xHamster.com.”

Me and a new friend at the “For the Love of Breasts” fundraiser, 2003.
Click to see the accordion awesomeness at full size.

The accordion often comes in handy

“You brought the accordion!” said my friend as I entered the restaurant for a little impromptu class reunion last night.

“It often comes in handy, and you never know when you’ll need it,” I said in reply.

Not ten minutes later, one of the waitstaff approached me. “Could you play something kid-friendly for my friend’s six-year-old daughter at the table over there?” she asked. “She would be so happy if you did.”

I walked over, and she and I performed The Hokey Pokey to the great amusement of the little girl and at a number of the other diners.

“Like I said,” I quipped as I rejoined my classmates at our table, “you never know when it’ll come in handy.”

I’ve been the Accordion Guy for nearly 15 years

May 1st, 2014 will be the 15th anniversary of the day that my friend Karl Mohr and I took our accordions out on the streets of Toronto. It was an unusually warm day for that time of year, and the bright, sunny weather brought throngs of winter-weary people outside, making the perfect audience situation for our busking debut. We ended the afternoon with an invitation to play our accordions onstage at the notorious goth club, the Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar (it’s a Starbucks now), where DJ Todd said that if we could get any applause from the audience, he’d supply us with all the beer we could drink. Here’s how that turned out:

The longer version of the story is in this post from 2012: 13 Years Ago, I Became the Accordion Guy.

The Atlantic says the accordion is “so hot right now”

“Once considered glamorous and sexy, then forgotten,” reads the subtitle of The Atlantic’s article on the accordion’s resurgence, “the instrument is making a comeback.” It had a heyday in the 1960s, with Myron Floren (the accordionist in Lawrence Welk’s orchestra) and Dick “Daddy-O” Contino as the instrument’s standard-bearer in popular culture, and countless bands playing polkas at weddings across North America, and with the occasional cultural blip from “Weird Al” Yankovic and Walter Ostanek, it remained a fringe instrument for the longest time.

Hey! I have a Crucianelli accordion too!

Over the past little while, the accordion has picked up in popularity. Celebrities like Lucy Liu, Christina Hendricks, Tommy Lee and Michael Fassbender have turned out to be accordion players. Bands on the alt-rock/indie scene, from They Might Be Giants to The Arcade Fire to Mumford and Sons and Of Monsters and Men have put the accordion front and centre in some of their numbers. With Nirvana’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, bassist Krist Novoselic will likely become the first accordion player to join those hallowed ranks:

The article closes by talking about the increased demand for accordion session players at recording studios or to join bands. I may have to take advantage of this trend.

Read the article: Accordions: So Hot Right Now

Thanks to Julie Leung and Jill Nurse for pointing out the Atlantic article to me!

Click the photo to read the source article.

In case you’ve lived a sheltered life, giving somebody a wedgie is the act of yanking up someone’s underwear by the waistband so that it gets wedged up in the victim’s butt-crack, as depicted below:

An atomic wedgie is a wedgie executed with enough upward force to pull the waistband over the victim’s head. The photo below presents a textbook atomic wedgie:

Atomic wedgies are hard to pull off (or is the proper term “pull up”?). Most of the time, the underwear rips before you can lift it high enough to get it over the victim’s head. Or so I’ve heard.

Brad Davis, the man pictured at the top of this article, is accused of killing his stepfather, Denver Lee St. Clair. St. Clair’s cause of death was determined to be from blunt force trauma to the head and asphyxiation, and Davis is said to have told investigators that he gave his stepdad an atomic wedgie. The local sheriff, Mike Booth, says that he’d never heard of an atomic wedgie before.

Who’d ever think that atomic wedgies could be lethal? Be sure to read the full account of the case, as it’s full of the sort of funny-in-a-horrifying-way details that only a small town in a state whose name ends with “a” can produce.

Thanks to Justin Kozuch for the find!

Click the nastygram to see it at full size.

Way back in 2005, I found a segment of a video titled Grill Skills, which Wendy’s used to train its minions on the finer points of burger-making back in 1989. The segment I found featured a really cheesy rap on how to make a Wendy’s burger. It was a product of its time, and silly as it was, in my opinion, it didn’t do any harm to the Wendy’s image.

I posted it on this blog, and months later, got the nastygram pictured above (and yes, Wendy’s HQ’s address is One Dave Thomas Boulevard, a street named after its founder). I recently scanned it, and thought I’d share it with you. Ah, lawyers — why haven’t we followed Shakespeare’s advice yet?

If you’re curious about the video, someone’s posted the full video on YouTube. Catch it before they get the takedown notice! As for the cheesy rap, it starts at the 4:00 mark. Enjoy!

For more about this video, read this archived copy of an article from The Wave magazine.