I’m a very, very, VERY busy man. It’s SO HARD running a successful small business out of the back of my gigantic 2015 Ford F-150 SuperCrew Cab XLT Pickup truck. When I first started, they said these Herbalife supplements would sell themselves. Turns out that’s not exactly true.
The demands placed on me as an entrepreneur are EXTREME, OK? I’m taking Zoom calls. I’m writing important things in my notebook. I’m practicing a growth mindset. There are just not enough hours in the day. When am I supposed to unsubscribe from all the email newsletters that I pathologically sign up for on a daily basis?
That’s why I’ve learned to multitask. Have you heard of it? It’s when you ENHANCE YOUR TIME by doing more than one thing at once. I heard an interview with Swedish time optimization expert Sven Berg on the Huberman Lab podcast and it has CHANGED MY LIFE, OKAY? I’m banging out bicep curls while meal-prepping. I’m doing yoga nidra while listening to the audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. And yes, I’m unsubscribing from emails while barreling down the I-95 corridor in my HUGE pickup truck.
Look, I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying, “Clive, that’s pretty dangerous behavior. You should be keeping your eyes on the road and not using your phone while driving.” THAT’S WHAT MY WIFE REBECCA SAYS TOO.
But that is a SELF-LIMITING MINDSET, OK? How do you expect to MAXIMIZE YOUR LIFE if you’re giving all of your attention to only a single thing at a time? How do you expect to MEET THE GOALS you’ve set for yourself? How do you expect to unload the BOXES AND BOXES of Herbalife Formula 1 Healthy Meal Banana Caramel Nutritional Shake Mix taking up space in your Aberdeen, Maryland split level?
“OK Clive,” you say. “Why not just stop signing up for email newsletters then?” One, it’s NOT THAT EASY. And two, you MUST HAVE BEEN talking to my wife Rebecca. WHO GAVE YOU HER NUMBER?
I can’t, OK? There are just too many of them. Everyday I AM AT WAR with my inbox in an effort to combat my COMPULSIVE NEWSLETTER HABIT. I have LOST CONTROL and until I REGAIN CONTROL I will continue to unsubscribe from emails while driving. I’m sorry.
Good grief, is there any holiday the Peanuts gang doesn’t try to bum us out on? This time around Charlie Brown has to go to Peppermint Patty’s New Year’s Eve party. The dilemma? He wants to finish reading “War and Peace!” Will Charlie be able to finish his book in time before.. uhm, ah, who gives a fuck?! This one also heavily features the extremely nuanced, totally three-dimensional character “the little redhead girl.” Thanks, Charles Schulz, your losery proto-incel bullshit is an inspiration to millions!
We really don’t get why so many New Year’s movies are romantic comedies. Do you know a single person who met their long-term significant other on New Year’s Eve? If you fuck someone on New Year’s at best you awkwardly have coffee the following morning and silently agree to never see each other again.
Not sure why anyone would want to ring in one of the last years we have left with “White Privilege: The Motion Picture.” You shouldn’t be rooting for a wealthy, shameless culturally appropriating Julia Roberts to find herself, you should be hoarding drinking water and canned goods!
Another New Year’s Eve romance ending, but this one’s the most believable of the bunch what with all the cheating, classism, and misogyny.
Remember that magical New Year’s Eve when you went hunting for your ex to get inspiration for your rising but recently stagnating pop music career, only to find that the best friend who’s been helping you is the real person you love all along? No, of course you don’t. You remember pigs in a blanket, cheap sparkling wine, and vomiting. Then you were hungover, then you went back to your shitty job. It’s not a romantic day!
The most prevalent type of New Year’s Eve movies are rom-coms, which again makes zero sense, but the second most common type is heist movies, and that’s way more plausible when you think about it. New Year’s Eve is a great time for robbery. Lots of cash flowing around, lots of big events, and everyone’s drunk and stupid, honestly we might try to pull one. Once you’re all distracted by Post Malone and LL Cool J rocking out in Times Square, we’re coming for the Planet Fitness vault and living out the end of civilization in style!
More New Year’s Eve Romance, depressed 2008 Brooklyn hipster style! In other words, bad!
This movie features Cher dressed as a mermaid at a New Year’s Eve party, which feels appropriately apocalyptic. Definitely has a Book of Revelations vibe.
Another romance movie and one about living forever to boot. Two things completely antithetical to New Year’s Eve. Especially now, don’t have children, they won’t see their teenage years thanks to all the damage we’ve done.
Do you like your New Year’s romance stories with the added artifice of a woman still loving a man after she finds out he was lying about being a millionaire? Then “Winter Getaway” is the movie for you! Also, you’re fucking WEIRD!
Another year, another heist, baby! The original “Ocean’s Eleven” took place on New Year’s Eve, and really, who partied harder on New Year’s Eve than The Rat Pack? If you can ignore all the womanizing, assault, petty miserdom, and other problematic behaviors from everyone involved in this film it’s a real swingin’ time, babe.
This 1995 sci-fi thriller is about the distant future of 1999, where technology has evolved to the point where people can record their experiences and emotions and play them for others. Remember that? Remember how hot that was in ’99? No? Exactly. This movie is a poignant reminder that our dreams of what the future might hold are just that—dreams. Here we are edging up to the end of days in 2024 and the closest thing we have to that is neuralink, which pretty much just kills monkeys.
More romance, great. What could be more romantic than a holiday synonymous with vomiting, loud noises, and broken promises?
This is our lowest-ranked New Year’s Eve movie that takes place on a train. That’s not saying nothing, there are four of them! Romance, heists, and trains, apparently that’s what New Year’s Eve is all about. This one is simply the least credible as civilization is clearly going to crumble long before some rich maniac can build a train around the world. Elon Musk can’t even run Twitter, there’s no way the Hyperloop ever happens.
Coming in third on our micro-list of train-centric New Year’s movies it’s “Trading Places.” Merry New Year!
America’s favorite politically Conservative leaning and literal hot, hotbed known as Phoenix, Arizona is an unlikely birthplace for AJJ, but said stinky and sweaty locale likely inspired the band’s atypical and non-Right Wing-tinged outlook on life and actual music. The band’s second studio album “People Who Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World,” was their first for Asian Man; both diva Kurt Vonnegut and esteemed author Barbra Streisand must be so proud. If you wish that The Hotelier was more of a folk-punk acoustic act, then this band and album are for you! Plus, it is easily the best album title of all time sans hyperbole, and we aren’t taking any further questions on the matter.
It seems that Mike Park has been in more bands than SR-71’s Travis Barker, but The Chinkees (we didn’t come up with the band’s name, and we don’t like typing it) is certainly his most superior act not named Skankin’ Pickle. The band’s debut full-length studio album “The Chinkees Are Coming” is a third-wave ska blueprint front to back, and showed the listener that Park was both a fan of the past AND ahead of his time. Recorded with the yet-to-be-mentioned Tuesday as Park’s backup band prior to gigging as an all Asian unit, “The Chinkees Are Coming” will appeal to fans of The Gadjits and The Hippos.
Speaking of the dastardly and polarizing three-letter word known as “ska,” Bloomington, Indiana’s own funk-influenced upstroke rockers Johnny Socko likely fell under your radar despite having the most third-wave band name of all time. Still, Hulk Hogan’s former best friend and confidant Todd Alan Clem certainly noticed the catchy Socko and epically used this album’s title track in its entirety as part of the introduction to Clem’s popular Sirius Satellite Radio Show “Bubba The Love Sponge”; yes, Bubba The Love Sponge. The diverse by definition effort from Johnny Socko, “Full Trucker Effect,” is their lone LP for Asian Man Records and without question the band’s best record, and after listening, at least half of your brain would agree. Sadly the band stopped their extremely heavy touring schedule just over twenty years ago in 2003, but happily they reunite every now and again for rock and roll shows in Indiana.
If you ever wanted the klezmer superstars known as Less Than Jake to listen to more “Pinkerton,” and apply said emo-tinged influence to their later material, we implore you to check out all of our favorite full-length studio LP listed here, St. Louis, Missouri’s MU330’s “Crab Rangoon,” right now this very minute, and return back to us right after its final seconds wrap up and your heart smiles. Finito? Fantastic. Anyway, “Crab Rangoon” is the most underrated ska-punk release of all time not known as Edna’s Goldfish’s “Before You Knew Better,” and we wish that the collective planet, err, knew better, and agreed with our righteous stance regarding such. Some call this band “psycho ska,” but we here just call MU330 awesome. In closing, frontman Dan Potthast has released some rad solo efforts as well!
We’re unsurprisingly gambling humans over here, so we surmise that it is either this effort from Zurich, Switzerland’s The Peacocks known as “Angel,” or the next to be mentioned unit from Southern California’s Pushover that is the most unknown to you, the dear reader of this article that you will have zero issues with. Describe THEIR sound? We will try, fans of rockabilly tinged punk like Melbourne, Australia’s superstars The Living End or cowpunk-esque Southern California AF outlet Social Distortion won’t want their Spotify monthly subscription money back after listening to “Angel” in its entirety. While no longer on Asian Man Records, the band still performs today, but usually in Switzerland or over the pond. So long, hello two Langhards and Luder.
If Riverfenix/Fenix TX’s self-titled LP, The Get-Up Kids once they incorporated keyboards to their post-hardcore sound, The Reunion Show’s sole full-length “Kill Your Television,” or Mýa’s straight-edge New York Hardcore masterpiece “Fear of Flying” is the type of pop punk or pop rock that you go for and/or went for in the late-’90s/early aughts, then it was your literal loss missing out on Southern California’s Pushover around that time period. However, there is still time to enjoy the band, as it is never too late to learn something new, unless it is. If this album came out two or three years earlier, the band would likely have at least two or three more albums by now, but sadly, we are not Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown, so we are quite powerless, unless we have power. Fun fact: Pushover contains several members of another underrated band called Mealticket.
Reminder, Santa Cruz, California’s Slow Gherkin may have the worst name for a ska punk band of all time, and that is saying A LOT as, outside of SoundCloud rap, which for some reasons contains more “Lils” than Debbie does, has the cringiest titles ever, but don’t be fooled by their poor taste in a band name and check out their sophomore effort “Shed Some Skin.” This record was ahead of its time in terms of the utilization of keyboards that the aforementioned The Hippos used just one year later on their nearly ska-less major label debut “Heads Are Gonna Roll.” If you dig “Shed Some Skin,” and we know that you will, check out their plethora of material prior and after. Fun fact that is not fun: Slow Gherkin has had a lot of band members, and if you disagree with a literal truth, check out their Wikipedia page!
Speaking of timing, which is a less of a blessing and more of a curse for many of these albums here, West Chester, Pennsylvania, and not New York’s Spraynard’s excellently titled “Funtitled” LP would have far more reverence towards it and its glory if this album came out after Modern Baseball’s “Sports” or The Front Bottoms’ “Talon of the Hawk”. “Funtitled” is the lone release here from the 2010s and also has the distinction of being the newest effort mentioned here. Still, its album cover is the gold medalist in this piece, and cats are neither spooky or scary but they are quite exciting with computer magic. Good enough for you, Gary? Ah, we hope so, as this is FAR from a sophomore slump… And their 2015 LP “Mable,” their 2015 features an animal on its cover too!
“Freewheelin’” > “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”… Fight us if you disagree with our just and righteous opinion, as we’re masters of war and can make you disappear. Anyway, Thursday may have stolen this band’s emotional thunder too much of today, but said day of the week doesn’t include Alkaline Trio’s Dan Andriano in their esteemed lineup like Tuesday does. In the wake of Chicago ska-punk band Slapstick, who released a compilation of tracks via Asian Man Records the same year as “Freewheelin’,” Tuesday banded together and ditched the off-beat upstrokes in favor of arpeggios and octave chords for just one EP and LP before calling it a day in 1999 shortly after their The Chinkees collab with AMR label owner Mike “Muhammed Ali” Park. At just ten tracks and slightly over a half an hour, this LP is a bike race that ends way too soon; goodbyes have been said.
Swing had a successful few-month run in the late-’90s wherein it was the mainstream sound with surprisingly large acts such as Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, The Brian Setzer Orchestra, and Embrace waving the Los Feliz flag as high as the eye can see, and San Diego, California’s Unsteady utilized said genre influence along with traditional ska, jazz, rocksteady, and Norwegian death metal epically on their second full-length studio LP “Double Or Nothing.” Opening an album with a five-minute instrumental is as punk as punk could be, and Unsteady’s genre-blending and musically proficient sound managed to stick out whilst not taking control of the world. Pity. As of press time, the band is at 396 monthly Spotify listeners, so we hope that you all infect its stream count page and make it the number 401 by the end of next month.
