Bad covers.

Was talking about pop music with my wife, and she noted that while it's fun to hear musicians and bands take a crack at other people's hits, some combinations would be a Bad Idea.

I like hearing different takes on well-known songs. I've enjoyed records like Enjoy Every Sandwich (the Zevon tribute album) and To Cry You a Song (Jethro Tull tribute) and Saturday Morning Cartoons' Greatest Hits, for example, and at Christmastime we all hear miscellaneous idiots trying out Christmas classics. There's even some bits from the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie soundtrack that are worth listening to, although that's counterbalanced by all the bits that are so very, very much the opposite of worth listening to.

My bride and I were agreed, though, that it's a good thing that singers and groups have wisely steered clear of songs that would not have suited them. So we made a list of our top 20 covers that we're glad did not happen. And believe me, it was hard to stop at 20. Your contributions are most sincerely welcomed in comments.

In no particular order:


Aerosmith: "Yakety Sax" (Boots Randolph)

Stevie Nicks: "Shaddap You Face" (Joe Dolce)

Yes: "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" (Patti Page)

Barry White: "Woody Woodpecker Song" (Kay Kyser)

The Verve: "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" (Rupert Holmes)

Stormtroopers of Death: "My Favorite Things" (The Sound of Music)

The Archies: "Run for Your Life" (The Beatles)

Bruce Springsteen: "Major-General's Song" (The Pirates of Penzance)

The Carpenters: "Animal (I F__ Like a Beast)" (W.A.S.P.)

Bing Crosby: "Black Dog" (Led Zeppelin)

The Crash Test Dummies: "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" (Spike Jones)

Iggy Azalea: "Honeymooners Rap" (Joe Piscopo)

Madonna: "Seasons in the Sun" (Terry Jacks)

Hank Williams Jr.: "Get Together" (The Youngbloods)

Whitesnake: "Daydream Believer" (The Monkees)

PSY: "Born in the USA" (Bruce Springsteen)

Taylor Swift: "Purple Haze" (Jimi Hendrix)

Mojo Nixon: "Be Our Guest" (Beauty and the Beast)

The Silver Platters: "Because I Got High" (Afroman)

Sonny & Cher: "Last Caress" (The Misfits)


(To be fair, some of these songs shouldn't have ever been released by anybody.)

Die!

I'm thinking of opening my own casino. I think it's a pretty good investment. I'm a little short on cash for the actual building, but I have the prototype dice:

Ha ha! No, of course this is not a prototype for my hotel casino project. Rather, it is a six-sided die (only a dork would feel obliged to point out the number of sides) that a relative got for me as a kind of "Someone Went to Vegas and All I Got Was This Lousy Souvenir" type gift. And I love it. You just don't find a lot of Fred merch among the name souvenirs.

I find gambling to be fun, but I'm too cheap to do it seriously. It's about the only vice that doesn't grab me. I keep thinking of exactly how hard I had to work for that C-note that just went flying into the croupier's drawer.

But owning a casino is another matter. Somebody's got to make money from all that gambling, and that's the house. Slot machines particularly line the house's pockets. Why not mine?

I might feel a little bad about it. I've seen real dedicated gamblers in action, and when they're in the zone, winning or losing, they are on Planet Gamble. Old ladies playing six machines at once would probably have to be pulled bodily from the chair in the event of a fire. I wouldn't want to be the fireman who had to try it. So maybe I'm too softhearted for that kind of thing.

Well, I don't have a good name for it anyway. "Fred's" might be okay for a barbecue joint but not for a classy casino. If I were to open it in Vegas, I'd have to find a gimmick. Maybe all Googie stuff; turn the page to the New Frontier era and keep it there. Space-agey but still Rat Pack friendly. Maybe we could call it Planet Gamble.

Hey, I'm starting to like the idea after all! Anybody got a spare half billion?

Return of the Spurn.

About a month ago I suggested that my younger dog, Nipper, had gotten to spurning breakfast so often that he could have been part of one of those mid-sixties groups that had maybe one hit -- Nipper and the Spurners! And he has continued to spurn periodically since I posted on the topic.

Well, longtime friend and never-commenter Mr. Philbin demanded a fake history of this fake band. And at Your Daily Dose of Vitamin Fred, we live to oblige.

📻📻📻📻📻

The Spurners were formed in 1963 in the proud city of Paterson, following a sound now known in legend as Jerseybeat. Johnny Nipper (born Johann Hinklegosser Maximilian von Ulm) formed the band, originally known as Nipper and the Spurners. "We were too poor to be a garage band," he told MTV's Beat the Music in 1993. "More like a garbage band. We practiced in an abandoned bowling alley, running extension cords to Mrs. O'Reilly's patio. We were formed on the premise that everything was stupid and we were spurning it."

The Spurners became fast favorites of large and grumpy crowds of teenagers throughout the state of New Jersey. They released their own single by pressing the 45s onto old X-ray film from autopsies. The songs, "I Kibble You Not" and "Denial Aisle," got the attention of music promoters in New York, and the band began to get gigs in the big city. At that time the group name was shortened to The Spurners, which fit better on marquees.

Moonbat Records signed the group in 1965, and "Kibble" reached #52 on the charts by December of that year. Their first full album, No, was commercially successful but not a hit. Songs like "Go Away (Stay Away)," "Ain't Too Proud to Shun," and "Rainy Day Spurnin'" did get some radio play.

Other songs included "This Dog Won't Hunt or Anything
Else" and "All You Need Is Shove"

The Spurners might have had a better career, but they turned down many opportunities. They refused to do an Asian tour, saying they'd heard bad things about the food. They chose not to appear on television's American Bandstand when they found out the host was not Dick Bark, as they'd thought. And when a rising young Jerseyite tried to join the group in the late sixties, they told him no, that he was a lousy singer, and Bruce was a funny name.

Still, they managed to keep recording, releasing many more tracks, such as "Put a Little Shun in Your Heart" (1969), "One Nope Over the Line" (1970), "Can Get (and Have Had) Enough of Your Love" (1974), "No No No No No No No No Song" (1975), then, in a change of gears, "Disco Inspurno (Spurn Baby Spurn)" (1976) and "I Just Want to Stop, Period" (1978). Their last song to chart, from the 1981 record Too Much Is More Than Enough, was "Spurnin' for You," which got to #99. After that, the group was tired of the whole business. Charges of plagiarism, which the band refused to answer, had dogged them for years. At last the legal troubles and personal difficulties got to be too much, and after two decades the Spurners began to spurn one another.

At different times, members have toured solo, using the Spurner name. Others, like drummer Hank "Hot" Doggerel, toured on their own into the late 1990s, in his case with the group Juncyard Dawgz, while bassist Fredo Poodelski started a group called the Nix.

But that was about it for the Spurners, who never tried to reunite and never gave interviews after 1993. As rock historian Stiiv Johnson wrote in his memoir, Pop Stars I Have Seen Vomit, "So dedicated were they to the fine arts of spurning, shunning, rejection, and negativity, it's actually amazing that they managed to form a band in the first place, let alone continue for almost twenty years."

No voice on the line.

A loved one calls about your dearest elderly relative a thousand miles away. The rebound was temporary, shorter than expected; everything has fallen apart, gone to hell all of a sudden. All these years of work and worry have come down to this.

She can't speak. She can't communicate, but she can hear. I'll hold up the phone so you can talk.

What do you say?

Swallow, hard. Marshall thoughts. Come on, words, you goddamn stupid words, you've been my soldiers all my life, now get in formation one goddamn time when I really need you.

Hello?

I'm so sorry you're so... sick. 

I wish I could be there right now.

I hope we'll talk when... when you're better.

I love you.

We're all praying for you.

God bless.

I'll see you again. 

Good-bye. 

No voice on the line.

The message comes in the night -- she's gone. It's over. Whatever was to be done, it is done.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, goddamn worthless words.

Person of Walmart.

Yes, I went to Walmart, which is always a thought-provoking experience in its way. I was glad to see that the potatoes had not been peed on, and in general the store appeared to be in order. 

I did take out my phone for some pictures, so you could join me in my ruminations. I did not take pictures of my fellow People of Walmart; I leave that stuff to the professionals. 

To quote my late father-in-law: It's August! Summer is over! 

Brach's, purveyors since 1904 of so-so candies that no one can resist, has already dived in with this huge skid of sugar. That's a lot of candy corn, considering that 99 out of 100 people will tell you that they hate candy corn (the 100th person is a major candy-corn devotee, though). What's in the Autumn Mix? Candy corn, pumpkins that taste like candy corn, and "Harvest Corn" (candy corn).

Autumn won't start for another seven weeks, though. But even here, where school doesn't open until after Labor Day, pool supplies and water pistols have been shoved aside for pencils and notebooks.

Sad!

But don't panic, kids! There's still time to shove in a few s'mores. In fact, though amazing marshmallow technology, you can get marshmallows with the chocolate injected in the middle! This way you can just stuff them inside two graham crackers and go nuts.

I would think putting the marshmallows on a stick would be a problem, though; chocolate melts quickly, even cheap chocolate, and I'd think you would be asking for the thing to turn into goo before you could put it in the graham crackers. Was not curious enough to buy a bag and check, though.

Speaking of back-to-school:

I have a friend whose college career was spent in what he and his pals called the Iced Tea Club -- if they could get no more than four C's in a semester, they could stay afloat. I think that gag doesn't work outside the New York area; 4C is based in Brooklyn, and I think it's just a New York area brand, isn't it?

I'm always curious to see brand names with a high-falutin' rep show up in places like Walmart. Godiva was the chocolate of the affluent back in the 1970s, generally sold in its own stores, and in other places where moneyed people shopped. Now? Walmart.

This is a baking mix. Yep, Godiva's down among the Betty Crockers and Pillsbury Doughboys. Smart marketing or total comedown? You decide.

Right here, though, for dessert, we have a pretty standard Walmart item:

It's a "treat." What kind of treat? Well, pretty much a Rice Krispie treat, but flat and tough. It cost a buck and was cheap at half the price.

Actually, as these things go it was pretty good. Yeah, that one I was curious enough to purchase. All this walking around made me hungry.

And so ended my sojourn at Mart du Wal; a pee-free experience and a successful shopping trip. Where else can you get your weekly groceries, a door mat, action figures, weed killer, and tropical fish? Not that I got any of the latter things -- but I could have!

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UPDATE: How sad that on the very day I posted this, some dumb son of a bitch in a Walmart in El Paso killed at least 15 people. God have mercy on their souls; God please stop the next son of a bitch who wants to spread the misery of his bad life choices onto others with violence.

Tooth salon.

Had to find a new dentist, which is always scary. Just when you get used to the old one, something happens and you have to switch. And I'd only been going to the old one for twenty years. I was finally getting him broken in!

So I did what every idiot does; I went on social media to ask people in my geographic area for a recommendation. Then I took those names and checked them against rating sites. And all of this is stone-cold useless.

It's not that I got bad treatment. Actually, the hygienist was fine, and I think I got a good preliminary exam and a fine cleaning. And I didn't have to wait long for anything. But there were a couple of things I objected to:

1) The salon style. Seriously, this place had a row of stalls with dental chairs. It was like I had just popped in for a shave and a toothcut. Maybe this is the picture of modern dental care, but it was new to me.

2) Every booth had a TV, and they were all playing Wallykazam! Oh, sure, it was educational. I learned all about the letters S and Z, and why you shouldn't let a Borgelorp eat purple flowers. And the zombie zucchinis? Hilarious. But it was all a little wearing after a while.

The zombie zucchinis could have used a dentist, actually.

Funny, I'm old enough to remember when kids' advocates like the Comics Code Authority prohibited the use of the term zombie. But the times, they have a-changed, I guess. You have to teach the letter Z somehow.

3) The dentist spent about three minutes with me. He had examined the X-rays while I was getting my cleaning, yes. Still, I just didn't feel like he was giving me the quality of care due for a patient, the care that makes one feel like any problems have been detected. On the other hand, he also said I didn't need any work at the moment, which made me want to give him a hug. So there's that.

4) But I also never saw the dentist that had been recommended to me by name, the one I'd mentioned when I made my appointment, since you do not select your dentist at this place; you get whoever comes up in the queue.

I guess as time goes on we'll see more and more healthcare being provided this way, a factory-like atmosphere with loud cartoons. It speeds up service, lowers costs for equipment and malpractice insurance and the processing of the endless, endless paperwork ... but is it best for patients?

This setup is also a good way to hide poor doctors, slipping them onto the Wheel of Medicine. "Around and around she goes.... Oooh, you got Dr. Smerschnock! Well, maybe's he's sober today."

My current family doctor has his own practice and is an excellent physician, but he's also as old as Methuselah, and we expect him to pack it in any day now. Then what? Find a pill mill? Four booths, minimal waiting? The doctor will see you now... don't blink or you won't see him!

Let's fly, let's fly away.