Okay okay okay. I’m late. We’re well into 2013 and I’m finally getting around to posting my favorite records from 2012. No excuses. I got kidnapped by a bear. That’s not an excuse, it’s just what happened. Luckily, I managed to escape. And then I ran immediately to the Internet and started typing up this list because one thing I will never do is let some traumatic incident with a stupid old grizzly bear stop me from writing about the records I love. That’s a promise.

13. Internet Forever – Internet Forever
I first heard “Break Bones” by Internet Forever forever ago in Internet time, back in 2009. It was catchy and charming and great, so I went onto this search engine thing I know about called Google and found 2 other songs by them, both of which were also catchy and charming and great. Here are 2 of those 3 songs.

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I guess I should say something about the election, since that picture of Joe Biden has been sitting there at the top of this page for far too long now.

Barack Obama won! Hooray! America!

That is all.

This liberal hand-wringing is getting a little out of control.

I have some bad news to report, friends. We used the wrong kind of dirt in the Awkward Press content farm and all our writers died. I think it was the soil. It also could have been the thin, airless plastic box we made them work inside and the fact that our in-house cafeteria only served pencil shavings.

Our humble little farm.

So on to the next plan for bringing this crumbling blight of a web presence back into the public eye. In looking at our stats, it has become clear to me that people love two things: lists and horror. The perennial top two articles are our friend Clay McLeod Chapman’s “Top Ten Horror Movies That You Probably Didn’t See,” years 2011 and 2009. I will not be competing with Clay’s wonderful articles, because I don’t know the horror genre well enough to say anything that would add to the national discussion. Luckily there is plenty of horror to be found out there in the real world that can be fashioned into an arbitrary list, so without further ado, I present to you: The Top Ten Real Life Horrors.

10) Houseflies

Houseflies are the filthiest, most disgusting thing in the universe, and they are ALL AROUND US. They lay their eggs in shit. Their eggs hatch into squirmly maggots that get their kicks snacking on human flesh. They hang out on garbage and filth and then get their filthy garbagey feet all over your food. They vomit acidic saliva on their (your) food before they eat it and they spread tuberculosis and they look a fright. They taste with their feet, for Christ’s sake. That’s all the proof you need that God hates them. Read the rest of this entry →

I AM SMARM.

Over the weekend, The LA Times published a piece that was intended to showcase the side of Mitt Romney that doesn’t come across in his robotic delivery, his stiff appearance, and his poorly defined stance on issues of political concern. We’re in trouble from the subtitle:

Friends see a warm, charitable man with a sense of duty rooted in his Mormon faith.

So right off the bat, we know this article is going to offer us no information of value. “Mitt Romney’s friends like him.” I don’t think there’s been a lot of debate in the public forum about whether or not Mitt Romney is cool with his pals. I would like to see the presidential candidate whose friends told the press, “That guy’s a total prick.”

The opening story is a doozy. Read the rest of this entry →

Exciting news! The Awkward Movie Challenge has returned! Only it is occurring over at our dear friend Mike Segretto’s site, Psychobabble. Today we will be discussing the film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. If you enjoy watching two grown men slobbing all over their favorite director’s knob, this challenge is for you!

Check it out here.

(Note: In the ongoing attempt to find ways of monetizing Awkward Press, we’ve decided to change business models from fiction publishing to content farming. From here on out, this site will focus on informative articles that will result in high rankings on search engines and lead to increased ad revenue.

Many thanks to our first sponsor, Dick Pasta. If you’re interested in advertising on awkwardpress.com, please contact us with your name, number, and a list of topics you would like us to write about in relation to your product. If you would like us to review your product, please include any “no-nos” and/or specific language you would like us to work into our unbiased analysis.

Tools needed:
- fingernail clippers
- nail catching device (garbage can, ashtray, empty pudding cup)

Steps:
1) Get alive. Upon birth, most humans are automatically preconfigured with a hard, keratin-based protective shell that covers the ends of their 7-10 fingers (known as fingernails) and 8-19 toes (toenails). (Please note: this primer will not focus on the toenails, as our sponsor Dick Pasta found the subject of toenails icky and not in-keeping with the fun, party-friendly nature of their erotic line of pasta products.) Read the rest of this entry →

At the end of 2010 I decided I would write one story every day in 2011 and post them on a website called, appropriately enough, The Story of the Day. At the end of the year, I figured, I’d have enough material to put together a really entertaining book. By that time, word of my project would have spread across the Internetoverse. I would be feted as the next so-and-so (is it Mike Birbiglia now? Is that who we like?) and literary agents would be crawling all over each other to sign me up, like maggots on a tasty piece of rotten banana.

As so often happens with projects that are started for all the wrong reasons, this one flamed out rather quickly. It wasn’t an abject failure … I followed through in January and February, fell off a little in March, and then totally went to pot in the months after that. By June I’d posted 86 stories. That’s not a bad total, and some of those stories are pretty darn entertaining. But it’s still a far cry from 365, which is how many days there are in a year (in case you’re one of those people who doesn’t know about time and math).

The project wasn’t a complete waste of time, because out of it came a series I consider one of my finest creations – Professor Blowjob and the Storm-Fighters of Courage. (You can read the series for yourself starting right here.) Prof. Blowjob embodies everything I enjoy about writing – ridiculous characters, absurd situations, juvenile humor, and gloriously awkward turns of phrase. It is most certainly not for everyone. But the people it is for, it is so, so for. And those people are, in my opinion, a criminally underserved market of readers. Read the rest of this entry →

I have been meaning to post this for like weeks now but have not had the time on account of how I’ve been on my annual month-long holiday crystal meth bender. But now I’m back and feeling better than ever … I mean, I can’t find about seven of my teeth, but that’s fine, I have plenty of pudding.

The point of the post is that my friends Dave & Gabe have a show on YouTube and it is soon going to be exploding with content. So get in now, on the ground floor, so in 2 months when your friends are all like, “dude, you have GOT to check out The Big Time Show,” you can be all, “what, you mean some future episodes that haven’t even been made yet? Because I’ve known about that shit like forEVER.”

The first episode is below; you can check out the entire hilarious series at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE21137175EEB208D. Spread the love! Share the laughs! Live the lie!

At a certain point, you just have to say “fuck it.” Every year, I go through the records I picked up over the course of the previous 12 months and find a handful of albums I truly loved and a bunch of music I barely spent any time with. So I gather all the albums into a playlist and spend the last month of the year (which is usually December) furiously listening in the hopes that I will stumble upon a bevy of hidden delights that somehow remained hidden upon initial listens. And I listen to them all with clear eyes and a full heart and inevitably end up saying “fuck it” and writing down the records I liked before the end-of- year listening marathon began.

This year presented some particular difficulties because this is the year I became a dad. I don’t want to be one of those guys who becomes a dad and totally loses touch with new music, because music is still really important to me. True, I haven’t seen a band play all year. Ugh, I just wrote that and felt a little sick. But that makes sense because seeing a band means leaving the house at night when I would rather be sleeping. Listening to music, on the other hand, is something you can pretty much do during every hour of your waking life, particularly if you’re someone like me who sits in front of a computer all day and doesn’t ever need to talk to another human being. I hope for your sake you are not someone like me.

You can even listen to music with your kids, if you want. Although I also don’t want to be one of those guys who’s like, “my kids are only allowed to listen to the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart.” Because every kid needs to have his or her crap music phase, right? Thankfully my daughter is still at the age where I can listen to adult-oriented stuff in her presence without her bothering me all the time with questions like, “what’s a gat?” and “why is the woman in the song making those horrible moaning noises?” I mean, I turn it off when her ears start bleeding. I’m a very conscientious father.

But having said that, I didn’t really have the time to sit with records as much as I would have liked this year. And very few albums really blew me away, aside from my number one album, which is one of my very favorite albums of the last several years. With all those caveats in mind, I’m just going to say “fuck it” and present the fifteen records that did the best job of breaking through the clutter.

15. Los Campesinos! – Hello Sadness
There are bands you want to fuck and bands you want to cuddle. Los Campesinos! is decidedly in the latter camp. But that’s okay … the band you want to fuck will only disappoint you and leave you miserable in the end. On the Campesinos! fourth record, they cover much of the same territory they’ve explored on their previous albums: heartache, loss, sorrow, and the impossibility of finding true love. The genius of the Campesinos! is that even when they’re nursing broken hearts, they still sound like they’re having a good time. Even if you’re not bowled over by their recordings, be sure to catch them live … if you can leave that venue without feeling like you’ve had a spiritual experience, I’ll give you your money back.

That’s not true. I won’t give you your money back. But I will be like, “whaaaaat?”

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