Author: badinia

Virginia Jones is a comedian, writer, and actor- probably in that order.

The Continued Adventures of Dr. Spaceman!

Dr. Spaceman donned their scrubs and surgical masks, and with the assistance of 5th Spaceman Kris Lutsock, who is on the Famous Mysterious Actor crew, took the win in last night’s Trivia Titans contest! It was touch and go for awhile, with two tie-breaker questions- the answer to the final question was Steven Patrick Morrissey, so I felt at that time that we were born to win.
This year, my compatriots and I have become increasingly obsessed with the excellent, multi-colored, ridiculous and divine trivia of the Shan-Rock Empire.

We started going as a joke and as an excuse to eat french fries in a basement, but we accidentally won a few times and things got weird. Our team includes Andy Wood, who is founder and chief operational officer of the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and a Rylee Newton, former Hollywood Squares writer and Jimmy Kimmel guest, myself, a tap-dancer, comic, and fighter, and my spouse, whom I make drive me around and tell me childhood stories about the Hundred Years War.
For awhile, our team was named after various things from 30 Rock, the best living television show, including MILF Island, Never Follow A Hippie To A Second Location, and Every Week Is Shark Week, until another group that had used Werewolf Bar Mitzvah threatened to drop us like jive turkeys in the parking lot, so now we have settled on Dr. Spaceman, the physician who warns Tracey Jordan that bread is a silent killer and that science is whatever we want it to be.

Team Facts:

Team Leader: Andy Wood, A.K.A. The Cute Beatle- Science and Sports
Historian: Ryan Gosling-because he was there. Also, elf-related triv.
Arts and Stuff About What The Japanese Eat: Virginia Jones
Television, Film, And Weirdness: Rylee Newton
Team Motto: “Let Go and Let Garp”
Favorite Question Type: Natalie Portmanteaux
Member Most Likely To Dance Obnoxiously In Order To Annoy Other Members:Virginia Jones
Skee-Ball Specialist: Virginia Jones/Rylee Newton (shared duties)
Favorite Movie: All Coen Brothers Except The Ladykillers
Favorite I Don’t Feel Tardy Song: The Strangler’s Peaches
Special Team Trivia: 100% of Dr. Spaceman is blue-eyed
Our Nemesis Team: There are other Teams?
It all comes down to the finals this weekend, the Clash of the Trivia Titans at 5PM on Sunday. We may come back winners. We may come back losers. But we will come back…men. At least, those of us who were men to begin with.

*please note: I have gotten needlessly aggravated that internet searches for my former spouse turn up on my analytics, so I have replaced his name with Ryan Gosling, because screw him.

Suicidal Tendency: Duck, Duck, Annihilation


Well, it’s not the first time a suicidal duck has made its way around the internet.

Well, maybe it is. It does remind me of one of my friend John Freeman’s dozens of bands, Duck, Duck, Annihilation.

As to complaints that the duck is too well-built to actually electrocute, (this is one product that never considered hiring a customer service staff) please consider either of the two easy backup options, given that you could hang yourself with the cord OR in dire straits, eat the duck, which if you are any kind of celebrity or known entity will result in a six month period where the phrase ‘eat a duck’ will be hipster shorthand for any suicide, which will confuse the heck out of people in food sales.

Eventually, it will end up in Cockney rhyming slang as a euphemism for sexual intercourse, which everything is.

The World Is Changing! Ask Per Mo How!

Peroxide Mocha are all about love. The love between a boy and a girl (not like THAT). And the love of a boy and girl for music . Love has seen them through highschool, military service, video gaming, inter-state relocation and many other adventures that have got them to this, the eleventh year of their existence as a band.

And through all of this, Pete and Rachel – for they are Peroxide Mocha – have created a series of home-made records that sound like nobody else, and which have winged their way around the world through post and internet and recommendation into the collection of a diverse and loving set of fans.

Pete and Rachel met in highschool in Sequim, Washington, in 1997 and recorded their first EP that very same week. After rejecting names like Salmon-Cherry Casserole and Don’t Touch My Moustache, they decided on Peroxide Mocha, and an era began. Their album Sit Down And Wait To Be Seated was released the following year. Vital Peroxide Mocha themes were mapped out, including sex, drugs, sarcasm, Japanese sweets and what it’s like to think someone is neat. Themes that were to be developed over a series of albums that would fall together over the next few years each time Pete and Rachel managed to simultaneously find time to sit down, fire up the PC and let the songs pop out.

Though Pete’s quirky beats and Rachel’s nonchalant delivery and funny lyrics were limited at first by the fact that neither had any idea how a record should be made, people who heard the results of their work tended to loved it, and played it to yet more people. The duo discovered that there were kindred spirits all over the world – people who think pocky is important and recycling is funny. People who got such a collective crush on the music that each new Peroxide Mocha album has now become a keenly-anticipated event for that small but very lovely club of people who Know.

Which brings us to Making Out With Strangers. Now in their 11th year as a band, Pete and Rachel are older, wiser and a bit more educated in how a record should be made – but they are still as nonchalant and natural as ever, and have managed to avoid building any desire to sound like anyone other than Peroxide Mocha. So while the sounds on this record might be a bit tougher, a bit slicker, the kind of thing that electro and eclectic DJs all over the world will find perfect for rocking a wide variety of dancefloors with, this is still the Peroxide Mocha we all love, the Peroxide Mocha who remind us that the tiny details of life can be stranger and more important than we’d imagined, that horrible things can be funny and funny things can be horrible, and that the word “frigidaire” deserves pride of place in the construction of popular songs. This is Peroxide Mocha, and they bring you love.
*swiped from their CD Baby Write-up!

My Favorite Things To Do On The Internet


Peroxide Mocha ponder the fragility of our existence.

1. Flickr-snooping: I like to look at picture sets of friend’s parties that I was not invited to. Alternate Name:*Snort* THAT hors d’oeuvre does not look very delicious.
2. Ex-Boyfriend-Googling: A classic, although I was sad to find that an ex had killed himself. Breaking up *is* hard to do.
3. Find My Own Death Announcements: When your name is Virginia Jones, you die several times a month. My family’s OK.
4. Myspace Hatin’: Not possible on Facebook, which is why it is still inferior in my eyes. I don’t want to be your friend, I just want to look at you and feel better that you don’t want to talk to me ever again!
5. Taking mental illness quizzes: I know for certain that I do not have a shopping compulsion. Everything else depends on the day.
6. OTHER STALKING VARIATIONS: Now, we all stalk enemies and exes, because it’s fun. But have you considered checking your own Youtube clip, obsessively, to see if people are watching/commenting on it? How about commenting on someone else’s clip that you like, and then checking back to see if other people think you comment on something you thought was funny was ALSO funny? How about writing a review of a product or service and checking on that, say, a hundred times? Just doing the cyber version of riding your bike past its house, all day- “Do other people love Kindle as much as I do? Do they like my parody song, Kindle in the Wind?”
It’s a big Internet! Get creative! What else can we do with free time, a negative attitude, and a 3G connection?

Auggie Roast Post-Mortem

Super-Christ Auggie-Star

A lot of people have been asking how the Auggie Smith roast went down. Here are the highlights as remembered by me:

Troy Thirdgill in a beautiful daishiki as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whom I’ll bet you didn’t even KNOW was a friend of Aug’s. Amazing.

Dax Jordan on Lonnie Bruhn: If you took away the palsy, he’d just be cerebral.

Andy Andrist on Dax: What’s in his neck, it looks like… an elbow?

Me on Ron Osbourne: Doesn’t he look handsome? This is the first time I’ve seen him in pants that didn’t zip into shorts.

Aug on Holli: Holli Pappan, she’s the second-hottest comic in Portland, behind Andy Wood.

Me on Aug: He talks about having kids, but he doesn’t understand that you have to sleep with the same woman…for nine months…in a ROW.

Andy Wood on Mustard Man: Musty couldn’t be here, but he’s missed because…

Aug: You’re gonna do the Musty jokes?

Andy: I wrote ’em! I’m gonna do ’em!

Andy Wood on Richard Bain: Did you hear that Richard Simmons is going on the Richard Bain diet? He eats shit, but only when it matters!

Art on Richard: What’s it like when Richard tries to dress up for an event- AWK-WARD!

Dax on Virginia: She’s a vegan, she rides a bike to work, and she’s still fat!

Me: I’m gonna kill you.

Dax brought some show-and-tell, in the form of a forgotten storage trunk full of Auggie’s possessions, including a photo of himself on the toilet, and a Christmas Looney Toones tie, from the dark days when he was first learning to dress himself.

At the end of the night, as we stood around finishing our drinks and laughing at the pain we were going to bring to people who called us fat, we heard a majestic KA-WHUMP and turned towards the sound, many of us crying “Shit, Lonnie!”

But it was a tiny lady’s boots sticking in the air, and the semi-sober but very embarrassed Edie Van Ness was fished out from where she had fallen. Once it was clear that she was not hurt, we went back to laughing. She is in the center of this photo, which was taken pre-fall.

Front: Andy Andrist

Behind Andy: Richard Bain and Ron Osbourne

Keith Wallan, Arlo Stone, Edie Van Ness, Auggie Smith, Troy Thirdgill, Holli Pappan, Susan Rice, The Top of Andy Wood’s head, Me Looking Like an Ass, Dax Jordan, Art Krug. I am not speaking to fully a quarter of these people now! life is fun.

Favorite Things

This flyer, featuring a mash-up of G.W. and a Smiths album cover, has been making me laugh on my bike commute for a week, so finally I post it, 24 hours after the event occurred.