My Band Name For Today

• Groupie Goat-Rope
  
• Punctal Plugs
  
• The Voice of Paul Frees Ensemble
  
• Secretion Management
  
• Bizarro Beatles
  

I stole "Secretion Management" from Bones blog. Check it out sometime.

I'm putting "Punctal Plugs" on my list-of-words-that-don't-mean-what-I-think-they-mean.

I see a big future for a performance art ensemble called "Bizarro Beatles". The mind boggles with possibilities.

Rolling Stone, the magazine for old people, recently mentioned this blog in their publication.

At least that’s what people tell me. I will never know.

They sent me courtesy copies. Of course I was properly horrified to see them all jammed in my post office box. I fired off the following letter (using something called snail-mail, which old people assure me they prefer), in large type so that they could read it:

Dear Rolling Stone,

I was shocked to see that you still exist when your recent issues started showing up in my mailbox. Please stop sending me your magazine. I am a rock and roll musician and as far as I can tell, your publication has nothing to do with music.

I will be eligible for AARP membership about mid-century, when I’m sure you will purchase my name from their list, assuming you last that long.

Until then, please find someone else to subsidize your butt-ugly hybrid of commercial hype and fake counterculture pandering. As your parents are probably long dead, I recommend begging for money from Barbara Streisand, as you both share the same fan base of rich middle-aged white lefties, and she has more money than you.

To my one fan at Rolling Stone: buddy, if you’re hard up for cash I’ll float you a loan. Otherwise, I’ll do my best to get you a more legitimate day job.

• Deception Island
• Nightmare and Dawn
• Phlebotomist of My Dreams
• Eat, Drink, Man, Woman
  

Deception Island is a real place in the Antarctic. There's your reality series!

"Nightmare and Dawn" is a cue from Bernard Herrmann's brilliant, icy score to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. You could argue that among the man's other accomplishments, he was a pre-minimalist, with his spiraling hypnotic ostinatos of repeated patterns.

"Phlebotomist of My Dreams" is the tip-of-the-hat to a somewhat creepy/suspicious local program that offers a free massage if you donate blood. Actually, in the flier, they spell it "masage", so it sounds pretty dodgy all the way around.

Thanks to my pal Sal for alerting me to this and making up the name.

"Eat, Drink, Man, Woman" is named after the movie, of course. But it would be a great name for one of those lightweight combos that play at expensive "date" restaurants. The name lets the crowd know that the band is self-aware enough to "get" the date restaurant concept.

Double points are scored if the restaurant is actually named "Date Restaurant". That would just be so meta.

Triple points if the date restaurant actually serves dates.

Now, off to my free massage!

Here are today's band names. Prepare for greatness:

• Mosquito Alarm
• The Ruminants
• Knob Hill
• Jane's Krakowski Addiction
  
• Abhorations of the Deep
  

Stronger than usual list today. I enjoyed these names. Mosquito Alarm is that "teenage repellent" sound they play around old-people restaurants.

It could be a knock-off of psychedelic 60's band "Strawberry Alarm Clock", giving new spin on the Roger Ebert line from "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls":

E.g. "I've been to parties where they played a mosquito alarm, but never a party where Mosquito Alarm played!"

I toyed with the name "Teenage Repellent". In fact, my band name of the day shall be:

• Teenage Repellent

This Blog is a Winger tribute site.

A Debra Winger tribute site!

Now that's comedy even Bevis and Butthead could get behind. Assuming they knew who Debra Winger was. Or assuming anyone else remembers the band Winger.

I always wanted to see an episode of the sitcom "Wings" featuring guest spots for Debra Winger, Wings Hauser and music by Winger.

No I didn't.

PS. I'm not even including the incorrect music maven Wing in this concoction ... except that I just did.

I'm Mark Wynkoop. Does this motion picture make me look fat?

Remember folks: Many of these tragedies could have been avoided. Actors(TM)! Use only union regulated actors(TM) for all your acting needs.

Actors. They're what's for dinner.

Also when the cop stands up and says "Something going on...." You're supposed to hear police sirens. Sound mix, actors, editing, toning down the script... Who needs it?

Band names -- Who needs 'em? You do.

Here they are:

• Friday Night Death Slot
• Pizza Hunt
• The Community Organizers*
• Agnes in Chaos
  

*Billy Preston/Jimmy Smith tribute band. It's a pun, folks. Everyone in the band would play the organ. Imagine that roll call!

"Pizza Hunt" could be a midnight madness style scavenger game.

I like "Agnes in Chaos". It could be like an Alice in Chains tribute band.

You guys know Dave Barry? That fat-cat Miami Herald humor column guy?

You know how he will write about something, occasionally placing two unusual words together side-by-side next to each other (sequentially)? Then he will comment that "it would make a great band name".

You know how lame that is?

Well, I'm Mark Wynkoop, and I have a whole blog like that.

For like six years.

Needless to say, my parents are very proud of me.

Of course they have no idea that I do this blog. See that thing up in the header about kicking your mom in the head? My mom would totally freak out if she ever saw that!

Anyway, here are your band names for today:

• Sterilization Bags
• Portmanteau
  
• Stifling Awkwardness
• Bridge to Nowhere
• Nuclear Laxative

Well, all this business about Dave Barry got me thinking. And what I'm thinking is that Dave Barry would be a great band name. In fact, I'm making it my band name of the month.

My band name of the month is:

• Dave Barry

Imagine getting up on stage in a crowded stadium and shouting "Hello Cleavland! We are Dave Barry! Are you ready to rock?" and listening to the crowd holler and roar!

Now imagine doing it in a stadium where the crowd actually knows who you are, and intentionally came to see you on stage with your band Dave Barry.

Either way, it would be pretty awesome.

But it's a lot easier shouting "Dave Barry!" without security guards chasing you off the field.

Believe me.

And speaking of fields, this new found obsession with Dave Barry didn't just come out of left field. I have a few things in common with media mogul Dave Barry. And after all, he's based in Miami and I live near Orlando. On weekends his stray gunfire actually zips by overhead.

You can read his oeuvre using a charming old-tyme hyphen-friendly blogging-scheme called "print-media". I think he is published in something called a "news-paper".

Old people have told me this.

And it's not like I'm a pathetic suck-up just trying to get him to mention me in his column. Even though he probably has dozens more reader than I do.

It's just that I think Dave Barry would be a really great band name...

--Also, Google Ad-Words pays me a bright shiny nickel every time I blog the words Dave Barry. To me, typing Dave Barry is like playing an alphabet slot machine that pays off every time, Brother!

By the way, did I mention my new band name of the month?
My band name of the month is:

• Dave Barry

There are only two band names for today.

And ironically there are also two different stories behind today's band names. I will tell you the most notorious one, and it has the added little kicker in the fact that it is absolutely true.

Today's band names are:

• Bacon Belt
• Redneck Vasectomy

Now the story:

I've been working for a week in Washington D.C.. Yes, I'm working in D.C. on September 11th, but I'm far too busy to attend the ceremonies near the Pentagon.

Essentially I'm delivering a software system, a portal and an information system (yes, three products!) for a management structure that routinely assumes I can deliver minor miracles in real time. I have a habit of saving their butts, in return for which they have a habit of conveniently neglecting to compensate me in a realistic manner.

I reviewed their documentation, and as usual their bids, proposals and requirements were hilariously unrealistic and contradictory. I was sitting in the main executive conference room at the big glass table (the chair where the CEO or director usually sits). I started jotting down some notes on a legal pad in a problem/solution format that I often use.

I wrote the introduction, and was called away. But I frequently came back to the table to check email on my laptop.

A couple hours later, today's band names occurred to me. So--since the pad was nearby--I jotted them down. Then I was off to another series of important and necessary meetings.

Later that evening when I was stuffing pages into my laptop case, I realized that I had left the legal pad laying on the conference table all day. Dozens of executives and officials had been in and out of that room that afternoon and had, doubtless, read my recommendations many times over.

Here is what the big yellow legal pad said:


Ordinarily I would be mortified.

But the more I thought about it, considering my command structure and the customer involved, it really wasn't such a bad couple of recommendations.

And it certainly was as realistic and helpful as anything they could come up with on their own.

Heck, I probably did some good after all.

• True Cinnamon
  
• Abdominatrix
  
• Supernova Impostors
  
• Cysterical Blindness
  
• Autoclave
  

Did we have "autoclave" before? It would be a pretty funny name for a band. Maybe they could get an endorsement deal.

Abdominatrix is a best-selling piece of exercise equipment from the Onion. Seems like I saw an infomercial for it late one night.

I like "cysterical" anything. There aren't enough cyst-based jokes, or as my girlfriend calls them, "tumor humor".

The following band names are excessivly wordy.  

My mailbox is quite literally filling up today with folks reporting the passing of movie voice-over giant Don LaFontaine.

Many of you know I do voice-overs (in fact my most recent movie credit was "The Voice"). I've always prided myself on what people assure me is a dead on "LaFontaine Read". In fact, since the early 90's I've joked that if LaFontaine died I would get his job.

But of course, like everybody, I'm quite sad to see him gone. Far beyond being a ubiquitous voice, LaFontaine really invented a new way of selling movies and assembling trailers.

He is missed already. We will all have to get used to living--in a world--without Don LaFontaine.