Justin Achilli

Karaoke is usually a pretty loose affair. You go, you drink, you pick some absurd song from a collection of titles that’s woefully thin, you end up doing the same song over and over, you become a hack, nobody wants to go hear the same people sing the same songs poorly anymore, and eventually you quit going to karaoke.

Despite the informality of the occasion, karaoke actually has a fairly serious etiquette. It’s more complex than common sense stuff, like “Kid Rock probably sucks even more as a karaoke performance,” but with a bit of forethought and attention, we can make the karaoke bar fun for everyone except the worst of all human beings. I mean assholes, not the Carolina Panthers.

1) No Pink Floyd
Christ, talk about turgid, boring and long. If you’re trying to put an insomniac to sleep, sing him some Pink Floyd by way of lullabies. If you’re trying to rock a bunch of drunks, only a retard would pick Pink Floyd, especially without an accompanying laser show (if you know what I mean, and some of you do).

2) Know Your Range
It’s not hard to sing. It’s hard to sing really well. Most people can carry a tune in a certain range, so find that and stick to it. Here’s a riddle: What’s terrible? The answer is “Some dude singing ‘Roxanne’ by the Police and thinking it’s all hilarious because he’s shrieking the ‘Roxanne!’ part all off-key. That’s not hilarious. That just fucking sucks.”

3) Rock Hard
Pick an upbeat song — one the crowd knows — and give it some motherfucking soul, fool. Karakoe is best when everyone is drunk and rowdy, otherwise it’s just a bunch of sots pretending they’re rock stars. No one cares if you sing well. They care if you entertain. Jump around, but not like an idiot. Sing your heart out, but don’t scream. Act out the lyrics, but don’t be all choreographed. There’s a fine but distinct difference between a guy rocking karaoke and some retard acting like a musically stunted Jim Carrey.

4) No Meat Loaf
That dude never made a single song of less than 214 minutes’ length. Even if it’s that goddamn “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” duet, skip it. It’ll be much better to see you and some honey-bunny singing “Summer Nights” or “You’re the One That I Want” from Grease. Yeah, Grease is ass, but it’s way less hellish than Meat Lumps and all its songs conclude in one quarter of the time.

5) White People Shouldn’t Karaoke Rap
Sorry, honkies, but it’s true. If you’re bad, the “irony” of some spindly little cracker stumbling through Snoop will cease to be amusing 10 seconds into the song (see below). If you’re good, it doesn’t matter — you’ll just be seen as a no-account Eminem wannabe. The two exceptions here are Eminem and Vanilla Ice. Eminem has way better diction, pacing and breath control than you, but if that’s not true, you’re in the clear. On the other hand, “Ice, Ice Baby” is so stupid it Rocks Hard (q.v.), so jump in with both feet.

6) No R&B. Ever.
Hey, Smooth Operator, why are you in a karaoke bar instead of getting a little “quiet storm” action if you’re such a sultry undercova lova? Also, this shit’s too downtempo, and you’ll just be pissing on everyone’s good time with some bullshit slow jam. Note: You may break this rule if you are a black guy. Sorry, black women, but y’all have to stick to disco (or Aretha Franklin) if you’re going to do “black music,” especially if you’re fat.

7) Being Hot Can Work Against You
It is so very sad to see a smoking hot girl stone cold wrecking some song. Look at cutie-pie on the left here. If you came into the bar and she was up there, not moving much, timidly plugging her way through some mousy Norah Jones song, you would cry. You’d think, “God is a cruel fellow, to make such a rad creature but give her no soul.” On the other hand, if you and your creepy friends were all huddled around the songbook and some fucking Pat Benatar blasted through the speakers and sweet thing started howling about “You better make sure you put me in my place!” when you looked up your brain and guts (particularly your heart) would explode 95 percent of the time. The point is, if you are hot, the onus is on you to Rock even Harder than normal, earthly people. If you fail, your beauty will be as a flawed diamond, suitable only for tipping drills.

8) Irony Is Danger (for You)
If your karaoke joint is filled with douchebag college students, you can get away with irony. Har har har — isn’t it funny how punk-rock you is singing the Backstreet Boys? No, and since it’s going to go on for four more minutes, it’s only going to get more not-funny when I have to slug down two more beers just to get to that point. When I get drunk, I get fighty, and this wouldn’t be the first time I’ve thrown a bottle in a karaoke bar. No one seems a better target than the ass-goblin smitten with his own cleverness.

9) Ballads, Especially Power Ballads, Must Be Treated With Care
They’re slow, yeah — they’re ballads, dumbass — but sometimes you need to break it down. All the dudes there Rocking Hard get the ladies all fired up, but the dude who drops bombs on “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”* Rocks way Harder, but in an understated way. On the other hand, the dude who goes up there and mauls Garth Brooks’ “The Dance” is just bringing everyone down, not breaking it down. Don’t get me wrong, Garth Brooks can rule the joint (“Friends in Low Places” is an even better drink-along song than Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”), but every song has its place, and most of them are Not Here. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is a magnificent song, but if you don’t work it, it’s going to be tedious up there, with you slowly plodding through, grasping at imaginary doves to heighten the drama. “Free Bird”? Forget it. Not even shitty-ironic-funny, like some stupid cheeser who shouts out “Play ‘Free Bird’!” at some non-Skynyrd concert.**

10) On the Matter of Rick Astley
Shit, man, if some dude can bring down the house with Rick Astley, I will buy him 100 drinks. He won’t need it, though, because all the ladies will have swooned and will be taking his number to join him when he heads home. Tearing it up with George Michael earns you 50 drinks, as well.

* Me. If you ever sing my song again, Shane, it’ll end with you calling 911.

** Some shitbag did this at a Moby concert I attended a few years ago. Moby complied, playing all fucking 6,000 minutes of “Free Bird.” And then he played “The End” by the Doors. When I woke up, eight weeks later, the “joke” was still taking place. And I missed Hybrid opening, too.

In case you’re wondering, white asparagus makes your pee smell funny just like regular green asparagus.

Hey, you clowns, here’s that promised chili recipe. It’s a good season for chili, and what with the “Superbowl*” coming up, the time is nigh to cook up some of this goodness. This recipe will serve eight to 10 people, or six burly dudes who gobble a lot. It’s really dense, though, so those four burly dudes will probably lie around a lot afterward.

One to one and one-quarter pounds flank steak
One to one and one-quarter pounds shoulder pork chops
Cooking spray
One and one-half tablespoons olive oil
Two cloves garlic, minced
One large white onion, coarsely chopped
One large green bell pepper, chopped
One Anaheim pepper, chopped
Two Serrano peppers, sliced
One jalapeno pepper, chopped
Four medium tomatoes, coarsely chopped
One cup cheap-ass Cabernet Sauvignon
Four cans (5.5 oz.) low-salt V8 or other vegetable juice
One tbsp. black pepper
One tbsp. cumin
One tbsp. chili powder
Salt to taste (but you’ll definitely need some)
The juice of one-half to one lime

Okay, fruity, here’s what you do:

Cut the steak into quarter-inch cubes. Yes, you have to do this. I usually put the steak in the freezer for about 15 minutes or so to firm it up in preparation for cutting. Put that aside for a minute, and go to work on your pork chops, cutting that into three-eighths-inch cubes. Yes, you have to do this, too (and you can firm it in the freezer the same way). Now coat a frying pan with the cooking spray and brown the beef. Set that aside, clean and then coat the pan with cooking spray again, and whiten up the pork over medium-high heat. Set that aside, too. I’m an utter carnivore, so I tend toward using the three pounds total of meat, but two will tide you over, believe me.

In a big ol’ stock pot, dump in your olive oil and make sure it coats the bottom. Don’t use your good, extra-virgin olive oil; just use regular olive oil, because you won’t be able to taste it under all the other ingredients. Heat the olive oil to medium-high and toss in the garlic, onion, and all the peppers. Stir it every three minutes, three to five times, until your onions are translucent. Put the top on the stock pot, turn the heat down to medium, and let that mess stew in its own goodness for another five to seven minutes. You will note that your kitchen smells maximum awesome — this is a good thing. If you’re cooking for someone you live with or who will be in the house for a long time while you’re preparing this, that person will make some sexy eyes at you because it smells so good. Don’t let that person know, but you’re just getting started. Once it gets all hissy, toss in your tomatoes, put the top back on, and let the tomatoes soften for about six minutes.

Add the meat, beef first. Let the beef have a minute or two of in-the-pot anger, then add the pork for another two minutes. Stir with a broken-off two-by-four that has a nail in it, a broom handle used to kill a man, or a rowboat oar with which you usually menace people from the side of the road.

Dump in the cheap-ass Cab. Don’t get good wine, for the same reason you’re not using your good olive oil. I used a five-dollar bottle of wine last time I made this and I had enough left over for beef stew afterward. Also, don’t tell anyone you use wine in this recipe. Chili fans think they’re all tough shit because they pour beer in their concoctions. While beer certainly has a place in chili, this time the red wine is going to help your steak and pork by bringing out their robust flavors, even underneath all the other crap we’re simmering here. Let the pot hiss at you some more, and when the wine’s all a-boilin’, pour in the vegetable juice. Turn up the heat and bring the mess to a livid boil.

In go the black pepper, cumin and chili powder, and you’d better stir, fool. Turn the heat down to low, cover the pot, and go screw around for an hour and a half. Return at random times to stir, making sure to break up any tomato remains during those first 45 minutes.

Leave the house and come back. Smell how rad that is? Good work, soldier!

Toward the end of the hour and a half — say, with 10 minutes or so left, add the salt a little bit at a time until it hits the flavor you want. Don’t just dump in a bunch of salt all at once because if you use too much, you can’t take it out and all your efforts will have been for naught. Way to go, dummy.

Right before you serve the chili, add the lime juice, stirring it into the pot of goo.

Optionally, you may wish to top servings with some sharp cheddar cheese, some chopped red onion, and/or some oyster crackers. On the other hand, you can serve it plain with just a sprig of curly parsley for garnish.

If you want hotter chili, leave the jalapeno and Anaheim pepper unseeded — just pop the seeds in there with the whole mess. Another option is to double the amount of peppers involved (other than the green bell pepper). You can also use a spicy version of the V8, but beware because it’s loaded with sodium. You might also want to use a little more black pepper or another clove of garlic. I don’t recommend adding more cumin or chili powder because all it takes is one mote too much and they overwhelm the whole affair.

If you want to make this stuff on the cheap — you can eat on it for a week if you’re by yourself — I recommend substituting ground beef and ground turkey breast instead of the flank steak and pork chops. You’re only going to save two or three dollars, though, so you’re best off doing the better grade meat. If you’re the kind of person who likes beans in his chili**, definitely go with the ground beef and turkey, though. When you turn the heat down after adding the spices, add one 14.5-oz. can of dark kidney beans and one 14.5-oz. can of black beans. The beans will stretch out the life of your chili even longer.

And there you have it. Chili always improves the second day, so if you have a chance to make this in advance and serve it a day after, by all means do it.

This chili is particularly good with Negra Modelo or Shiner Bock. It’s also fine with Budweiser (not Bud Light) or my personal favorite, Pabst Blue Ribbon.

* No Superbowl should ever be fouled by the presence of the Carolina Panthers, but since Philly couldn’t get its act together, we’re cursed to see it happen this year. BOO TO THAT.

** Strictly speaking, chili doesn’t have beans. Poor people use beans instead of more good stuff as filler in chili, which actually becomes soup with the beans’ addition.

My fingers are all stiff from running in the cold! Luckily, I have a wicked pot of chili on the burner. Anyone want the recipe?

Until I warm up, listen to Eric’s Blue Monday remix.

The wait was interminable. Every hour, only fifteen minutes passed, and even that was spent in the proximity of horrible, horrible women. In fact, however, they weren’t women but ladies, though certainly not in any noble or genteel sense. No, these were boorish, loud ladies, Midwestern in size and shape, wearing sandals in late October, cursing casually, extolling the virtues of their newsstand-purchased playing cards (“They say ‘Cleveland’! They say ‘Cleveland’!”), wearing immovable remnants of hairstyles that plagued earlier decades that had not yet expired here in the Heartland, talking of liquor, priding themselves that they had secreted in their purses bits of candy for when they “needed sugar” despite the fact that their bodies belied the fact that they needed nothing and, in fact, had plenty to spare. Their faces were jowled and mannish or birdlike and shrill. The time dilation must have been their doing: The nearer one sat to them, the more this tyranny of time taxed one’s will to live. They played bridge vociferously. “What’s nello? You see, I just need briefing.”

Let’s just hope that Sunday is a better day for football.

I would have picked the Rams over Carolina, but that didn’t happen. I would have picked New England over Tennessee, which is how it worked out, but dammit, I wanted Tennessee to win. Those guys have heart.

For Sunday, I’m following my heart, too: Indy and Philly. In fact, wouldn’t the Colts versus the Eagles be a great Superbowl? Certainly better than any Superbowl involving the Panthers, and New England’s utter lack of a running game is frustrating to watch.

Hey, kids, are you like me? Do you like the games? Kids love games, right? Well, this is a new game you can play. Just don’t play it near me.

Click on the picture of the kids waiting outside the mall for their mom to pick them up in the minivan to download. Adobe PDF format.

It’s a load of crap.

The number-one selling book on Amazon.com right now is an Atkins-derived anti-carb diet book. The grocery stores sell low-carb “Atkins” bread. You can’t go into a restaurant nowadays and order something sensible from the menu without the servotron asking you, “Oh, are you on Atkins?”

No, I’m not on Atkins, you fucking retard. I’m just paying attention to what I eat.

The Atkins people — both the publishers and the lifestylers — are a cult. The publishers have a hot item on their hands because Americans don’t want to be the giant, fat pigs they are, but they don’t want to work for it, and this quack diet is an easy answer for them. The lifestylers, those who follow the Atkins diet and its spinoffs like the South Beach* diet, think that they’re leading this ultra-healthy, slimmed-down lifestyle. The publishers aren’t morons; they’re laughing all the way to the bank.

The people following these bullshit diets, however, are deluding themselves. Sure, the weight comes off on the Atkins diet. You’d lose weight if all you ate was Skittles, all day, every day, too. It’s the same principle: You deny your body certain things it needs to keep functioning normally, so it starts to digest itself for what it needs to keep you going.

Atkins works by inducing ketosis, a natural physical state in which the body burns fat as the primary source of energy instead of deriving it from ingested carbohydrates. Most people achieve some state of ketosis every day, such as by not eating for a long period of time (overnight) or after a workout.

Being in a constant state of ketosis, however, isn’t how your body is supposed to function, but that’s what Atkins creates. That’s why, once people end the diet, all the weight comes back. As soon as people stop eating like some weird voodoo cult tells them and start eating like human beings again, that unnatural state ceases, and people revert to their normal way of functioning. If they return to their old ways, that means all their effort was for naught.

Fuck that crap. People are omnivores. They’re supposed to eat all kinds of things. I once ate a handful of glass beads (you know; the kind you use in card games). Okay, maybe that’s a bad example. However, if you attain a proper state of nutrition, you can even eat crud that’s actively bad for you and not have to worry about it. You just can’t eat that crud regularly.

Screw Atkins. Your body is smarter than you. It knows what it’s supposed to be doing. If you try to trick it into doing fruity things, it will punish you for it eventually. Here’s the Motherfucking Achilli Rocket Genius Health Plan:

1) Don’t be a goddamn pig.
2) Don’t be a goddamn lazy slob.

Here are the straight-up, I’m-not-trying-to-sell-you-my-diet-book program facts:

Weight is best lost and more sensibly maintained by dealing with calorie intake.The average person needs between 2,000 and 2,700 calories a day (though women often require less). A pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. What does that mean? Well, a pound of stored fat equals 3,500 calories above and beyond what you used during a period of time.

All you have to do is watch that calorie intake. Note that fat contains lots of calories. Cut down on shit that has a lot of fat in it and you’ll cut down on a lot of extra calories, which then won’t have the opportunity to stack up in fractions of 3,500 — which eventually become 3,500 and translate to pounds of extra ass, thigh, love handle, gut, whatever.

This is the “don’t be a goddamn pig” section of my health plan.

Physical activity increases metabolism, which increases how quickly you burn calories. Go run. Go lift some weights. Go fight with skinheads in the parking lot. Hell, make out with your girlfriend for an hour**. The more you get your heart rate up, the more it’s inclined to stay up, and the more it stays up, the more you burn.

Also, do a little math. Running for half an hour at a decent rate consumes about 500 calories. If you ran every day for a week for only half an hour, you’d shed a pound in that week (assuming you didn’t eat a fucking box of Twinkies afterward). In addition to burning those 500 calories per session, you’d be telling your body, “Hey, quit fucking around. Let’s get going” and you’d burn more calories even at idle than you would if you just sat around playing Yoda of the Fifth Dimension Galaxy on the Playstation all day.

This is the “don’t be a goddamn lazy slob” section of my health plan.

Advanced crap. Some stuff also helps you out, but you don’t necessarily need to worry about it at first. Still, it’s good to know and think about where you’re going. If you don’t have a goal, you may as well be one of those pro-Atkins fruitcakes who believes in unicorns and Tooth Fairies and magical weight-management lunacies.

Get big. Muscle mass takes additional calorie count to support. If you want to lose weight, add some strength training to your regimen, so the muscle you put on helps with the weight loss. Women, too. When I say “get big,” I’m not talking about becoming a WWE-sized giant beefcake, nor am I talking about fucking with steroids or mass gainers. Just do it naturally. You’ll like the way it looks, too, as when you build lean muscle mass, it looks better on your human body than a gravy-filled ham arm does.

Your body is a furnace. Treat it like one. When you build a fire, you don’t just dump a thousand pounds of logs in one place and throw matches at them. You put a few logs on the fire at a time, placing new ones in the blaze as the old ones burn down to ash. Metaphorically, I’m saying, “Don’t eat a bunch in one sitting.” Eat four to six times a day, with those meals being smaller than what you’re used to if you eat three or (God help you) two times a day. Your body will process them more efficiently, using what it needs and having no reason to store leftover stuff it hasn’t used between meals.

Drink water, and lots of it. If you can, drop soft drinks entirely. They’re garbage calories — Coke weighs in at 120 to 150 calories per can, and God only knows how much extra junk those never-empty buckets of soft drinks they serve you at restaurants contain. Water also helps weight loss, in that it’s a negative-calorie exercise to drink it. That is, water has zero calories. The amount of effort it takes you to get up and get a glass of water expends more energy than it gives you in return. Water’s just as refreshing as any other beverage***, and isn’t laden with extra sugars, sodium, fat, spare carbs or other waste.

This is the “maximum awesome” section of my health plan.

* Come on, people. It’s named after a place in Florida. Why would you want to observe a health trend that originated in Florida? Florida is where white trash breeds, old people go to die, and methamphetamines are considered a legitimate hobby.

** The last time I read estimates, “vigorous lovemaking” consumed 400 calories per hour.

*** Booze is more fun, but hugely caloric.