I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, two become a law firm, and three or more become a congress.

I have become known to many as the gayest heterosexual male history has ever known; In fact, several of my good friends are still waiting for me to cease this whole “womanizing” thing and finally come out of the closet.

The fact that I love musicals doesn’t help my case much.

One of my very favorite musicals is 1776, which is a creative/humorous retelling of the debate leading up to the declaration of independence.

1776 features John Adams as the irate underdog trying to rally a lethargic congress to get off it’s ass and declare war openly (a war which was already well underway, just not sanctioned officially). Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are the supporting leads, Franklin being the comic relief and wise sage character rolled into one, and Jefferson being the also-protagonist foil to Adams (Adams keeps browbeating Jefferson even though they are allies in cause.)

There’s so much about this musical I’m totally gay for. There are founding fathers acting lewd (mostly Franklin) and drunk (mostly Stephen Hopkins of Rogue Island). There are biting exchanges of insults between the opposing camps, usually with a really wonderful current of mutual respect (excepting for Mr. Adams. Poor Johnny.) There are empassioned appeals to freedom and personal responsibility and a genuine sense of real patriotism (ah, but for the days when we fought for things that weren’t just good, but made sense.)

And there are also silly rhymes and catchy innuendo-laden tunes.

In the original Broadway production, John Adams was played by William Daniels (who you probably know better as Mr. Feeny, from Boy Meets World, or the voice of KITT in the original Knight Rider). In a much more recent 1997 revival of the play, Brent Spiner (who you probably know better as Lt. Commander Data) played the role. Awesome, but second string, actors playing the man who would become the first awesome, but second string, US president.

Oh, and there’s a song about slavery. Stay classy, 1776!

Through the wonders of the internet, I’ve found a listing of all upcoming venues where it’ll be playing! Sadly, this doesn’t appear to be an RSS-enabled listing, so I’ll have to feed it into my ancient page-pinging system to keep tabs on promising, nearby productions.

• A rat always knows when he’s in with weasels
• They’re lining up to go insane.
• That deep blue sky is my home
• Independent as a hog on ice
• It was all ripe for dreaming
• All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes
• Stayin’ out of circulation till the dogs get tired
• At night I pray and clean my gun
• Whittled from the bone of Cain
• I feel like a preacher waving a gun around
• God used me as a hammer boy to beat his weary drum today
• Damn good address for a rat
• I’d like to hammer this ring into a bullet
• I’m not Able, I’m just Cain
• They sharpen their knives on my mistakes
• There’s always free cheddar in a mousetrap, baby
• Man’s a fiddle that life plays on
• They that dance must pay the fiddler
• Don’t go dreaming, don’t go scheming
• Well my friends think I’m ugly I got a masculine face
• Don’t trust a bull’s horn, a doberman’s tooth, a runaway horse or me
• Like a kid who captures a firefly, leaves it only to die in a jar
• Who ever thought hell’d be so cold?
• I wanna look in the mirror and see another face
• Yellow dog knows when he’s sinned
• The carpet needs a haircut
• He’s been seen at the table with kings
• He can turn himself into a stranger
• Everything this doughboy does is wrong
• Lie to me baby, I have no use for the truth

describe a girl as…

• a “tawny moor”
• a “sad luck dame”
• “Nothing wrong with her that $100 won’t fix”
• “all liquored up on that road house corn”
• Hair black as a bucket of tar, skin as white as a cuttlefish bone
• I was the jewel of her sin
• a “Salvation Army Band girl”

Advanced mode

• Your love is a faucet
• Got a wooden coat, this boy is never coming home
• The day when home early and the sun sank down into the muck of a deep dead sky
• The cracked bell rings as the ghost bird sings and the gods go begging here
• I feel like a slave ship upside down wrecked beneath the waves of a grain
• And by the time they finished “Moanin Low” I was soakin’ wet and wild eyed.
• There’s always some killin’ you got to do around the farm
• For want of a bird the sky was lost
• There are those who say beneath his coat there are wings
• He once killed a man with a guitar string

I love my iPhone and Zune 120, but I hate albums that don’t have cover art.

A simple modification to the ocremix.org masthead, to use as cover art for mp3 players! (click thumbnail for full size)

And a lot of my music comes from Overclocked Remix.

Now, they have several compilations and all of those have cover art, but there are so many delicious standalone tracks based on video game music.

• Tracks like Ilari Nieminen’s ‘Lake in Ontario?, which is a superawesome Yes/ELO/Prog Rock remix of a few of Final Fantasy X’s themes.
• Tracks like The OneUp’s ‘Terra Haute’ , which is like a Chuck Mangione rendition of Terra’s Theme from Final Fantasy Six.

I could go on. There are too many good tracks. Regardless, they always come up with a terrible default album art in modern mp3 players. And so, I took it upon myself to spend 3 minutes making something appropriate. And here it is fo you to enjoy as well!