My Band Name For Today

• Brainwave Entrainment
• Garritan Personal Orchestra
• PumpWater
• Remote Control Paxton
• Lament for Icarus
• The Narrow Shoulders

• Shaved Monkey
• The Built-In Advantages
• Money Hole
• Stupid Baby

• Wilhelm Moment (Maybe "A Willhelm Scream" tribute band?)

If I put "Wilhelm Scream" up there, then I have to include:

• Castle Thunder

• Vibram Patented Soul
• Logic Probe
• Ghost Duster

• Second World
• Funny Ha Ha
• Dare Diver

• Diagnostic Blonde
• Death Perception
• Deadman
• Born To Sweet Delight
• The Edge of Night
• Malformed Container Virus

I just repeated it. My band name for today shall be:

• Chocolate City
  

After almost a year of running this list, I write "Best Band Name in the World" and my hits jump like crazy. A smarter musician than myself might say "exponentially". It's now in the double digits, I tell ya. Literally dozens of hits!

No, seriously, wazzup with that? I must have been indexed somewhere (or possibly intoxed somewhere), but it certainly isn't Google. I will have to do some work to see where you are all coming from.

Info for Newcomers:

These are not real bands. These are names which I think of for my own, unnamed band. Problem is, I can think of a *lot* of awful, awful band names. You are free to laugh and mock my attemts, or even suggest your own. And I will laugh an mock. Where's your Messiah now, reader? [maniacal laughter]

[Several minutes later] The band names I am using today are:

• Revirgin
• The Bondage Ballerinas
• Critically Hip (first album name? "Hypocritical"!)
• Platypusha

• Cotton Rocket

(Come on! That one's pretty good!)

• Timmy Big Hands (thanks Brains!)
• Problem of Criterion

• Back Stage Betty
• Bulbosity

Happy Birthday, Karen!

• Unique Melanie
• Catatonic Cantaloupe
• Ocean of Oxygen

• The Polycystic Ovaries
• I Live in Vapour
• Hard Scarlett

• Finger Scammer

• Wept With Eloquence
• God's Ventriloquist
• Timmy Tinkletop

• Hippie Absolution
  

*And finally, our first self-proclaimed "Best Band Name Ever"!

• The-Band-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named
  

Whoa! When I thought up "The-Band-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named" I almost flipped out and kicked my mom in the head!

Mom Disclaimer:

Someday, my actual beloved mother will discover this website and be aghast--SIMPLY AGHAST, I tell you--that a son would even contemplate kicking his mother AT ALL, much less in the head.

Dear Mother, let me assure you that my assertion is both referential and idiomatic. If my gentle readers were to know you--as do I--for the warm, perdurable caregiver you are, they would esteem you--as do I--and laud you among the great women of the world.

And very few, if any, would be inclined to kick you in the head.

Except, perhaps, those afflicted with a variety of schizotypal and antisocial personality disorders, as diagnosed along the right horizontal axis of the DSM-4. Or possibly certain victims of blunt-force trauma, and other head injuries, which are known to affect the judgement and empathy responses in the human brain.

Plus a lot of the jerks on the internet are just plain buttholes.

--Your devoted son,

--Mark

--The so-called "Laugh Magilla" of sparsely viewed band name web sites.

"Laugh Magilla", that's my new moniker. Not self-proclaimed, hon non, mon petit script kiddies. I have been dubbed the "Laugh Magilla" by a very authoritative source (more to come).

So of course, my first thought was "Hey, 'Laugh Magilla' would be a great band name!"

So here it is. The name of my bands for today are:

• Laugh Magilla
• Crotchtacular
• Squisher
• Crow on a Stick

BTW, "Magilla", as it turns out, is actually pronounced "Mah-GEEL-ah".
Who would have known?

• The Fricatives
  
• Food Runner
  
• The Dead Talk Back
  
• Suck Fony (Thanks Wheetus. Check out their new album if you're so inclined)
  

• Skank Whistle
  
• Panic Attic (sic)
  
• Lawn Jockey
  
• Skunky
  

Here are more of the best band names ever. Or the worst. You be the judge.

Actually, now that I think about it, they're pretty good names. I must just be having self esteem issues.

Then again, that previous sentence was a bit clumsy.

Here are my band names for today:

• Ghostly David Manning
• Nurse Beeper
• Neckbelt
• Frank Syncope
  

Today's Band list brought to you by delicious QB-Strips(tm) Chicken Filings and QB-Strips(tm) brand malted milk flavored beverage. Now with Soy. In Honey Mustard or Cool Ranch.

• The Moxicans
• Squint
• Personal Bacon
• Tzeviya

• Elvis and the Shoemakers
• The Deadly Mantis
• Secret People

• Ghost Like Swayze
• Courtesy Flush

• Wide Body Benz
• Validation Laxative
• Slydee McGee
• Oldest Band in the World

--From Beyond The Grave!

First, the Band Names:

• Paint Shop Joe
  
• Headless Chicken Soup
  
• Godzuki
  
• Bambleweenie
  
• Out-of-Town Jasper
  

Now, the rest of the nonsense:

New Year's Editorial:
Embracing my Headless Chicken Heritage
Melbourne, Florida

"Avoid cliches like the plague. They're old hat."
--Unknown

I have two dark secrets. More really--but chief among these are that (1) when I am not making films or music, I am an engineering scientist, and (B) I grew up in Western Colorado. Let me be specific: I went to school in the hometown of Mike The Headless Chicken.

Figure 1. The Apocalyptic Bathroom Tissue

Of course growing up in the 80's, we never heard of Mike. It was a story forgotten for fifty years, buried in the hometown newspaper. Flash forward to 1998. I was making crazy money in the computer industry (well, money, at least) on the East Coast, little realizing that the computer industry had made its way back to my sleepy hometown. But sure enough, someone was archiving The Fruita Times onto LexisNexis for whatever reason. Keep in mind The Fruita Times is the kind of paper that lets you know who had Sunday dinner at who's house on Elm Street.

Fruita is the kind of town you'd get if a handful of people from Mayberry and Lake Woebegone decided to incorporate a new, smaller town, to get away from all the hubub.

Needless to say, during LexisNexis archive of The Fruita Times, Mike the Headless Chicken (M.t.H.C.) was rediscovered in a series of front page stories from 1945. And since this was the Wired era of the late 90's, the rediscovered story subsequently hit wire services worldwide as one of those "weird news" items. Newspapers ran with it, Newsweek, CNN, Usenet--the works. Mike was big news again, more than a half century after right-thinking individuals had brushed him from their minds..

Long story short, the rediscovered story hits Yahoo, all my engineer friends are laughing at this Podunk town out west.

I didn't say a word. I didn't even make eye contact with them.

Flash-forward once again to the distant future of 2005 A.D.. Flying cars and jetpacks fill the skys, robots have made physical labor obsolete, and rockets blast off to the teaming cities on Mars and the Moon.

It was Christmas, and I was flying home to visit my parents. As I made my way through Grand Junction's Walker Field airport, there was a display of Mike the Headless Chicken toilet paper.

You heard me.

Anyway, I was so distracted with work problems that I was in no mindset to enjoy a visit to my hometown, much less some inane bathroom tissue bearing the licensed image of decapitated poultry.

I almost rushed right passed the M.t.H.C. T.P., heedless of my own headlessness, if you'll excuse the turn of phrase.

Poultry In Motion
Suddenly it hit me; the blast of mixed metaphors was like a bull in the hand by the horns in the bush. Or maybe I was woozy from the change in altitude.

Either way, it suddenly all clicked. In a non-sequitur moment of near-Pythonesque revelation, I realized my long boyhood voyage had come full circle.

I was both that farm boy from a Podunk town and a geek at a faceless multinational company! What's more, the inner farm boy was more fun than the inner digital wonk. I had become a very boring guy.

Indeed, the creature running around with his head cut off was me.

There was no other choice; I had to quit while I was ahead or else I'd lose my mind. (Sorry. I genuinely apologize for that pun. Kinda. )

The story really ends there, but if you are the type of gentle reader who prefers a more externalized sense of closure, I offer the following "writer's embellishment".

This Writer's Embellishment is brought to you courtesy of the James Frey Foundation for Adding a Million Little Pieces.

So that day, I quit the computer industry an vanished into the upper San Juan Mountains between Silverton and Durango. I took up a new life as a carpenter with a colony of achievers and industrialists, creating a secret meritocracy based on accomplishment only, and nothing else.

If you chance to stumble across this hidden colony of supermen, don't ask for me by name. You'll never find me. Just keep asking yourself: Who is John Galt?

END OF WRITER'S EMBELLISHMENT

--M. Andre Wynkoop