We've Only Just Begun

...to make bad Carpenters puns.

Thankfully, today's (brief, all holiday-like) post concerns the other Carpenter.


Halloween.MP3



We received this recording anonomously, credited to someone named Aggrocragg. I suspect Boyle's involvement, if only because the tapes were redolent with the stink of carrier pigeon guano that's become his calling card. Hopefully by Thanksgiving I'll succeed in grabbing, stuffing and roasting one of those flighty bastards, but no such luck yet.

Happy Halloween! But remember: if you're home tonight... minding your own business... and some kid comes knocking at your door asking for candy...

He could have just killed his sister.

SPOILER ALERT!

No Men=No Maids

You're aware, I assume, that there exist very real threats to our livelihood. We're surrounded on all fronts by faces of terrorists and journalists; war criminals and rock music critics. And trust me, they are cut from the same cloth. Their intent is to instill fear and self-doubt. They have chosen to destroy rather than create. They are instigators.
What is our reaction—Do we negotiate? Do we panic? Do we hide up in our hidey-holes with our lil' hidey-blankets, calling up imaginary hidey-friends on imaginary hidey-phones?

Don't be ridiculous. We build missile laser defense shields. It's what the big boys do.
How else to make sure that those ne'er-do-wells are kept outside our nation's borders? And for those of you worrying about your own private borders, this tech tree trickles down to consumer products like Illegal-Immigration-Laser-Defense-Shield, Unwarranted-Wiretapping-Laser-Defense-Shield and Definitely-Not-A-Recession-Probably-Laser-Defense-Shield. All pocket-sized, on-the-go like. Which brings us back to the age-old equation:

X + Y = (^_^)

In which X = Tax Dollars
Y = Flagrant Government Spending
(^_^) = Cool Gadgets For Me To Buy

Even with all of these precautions, the breakdown in security starts with the introduction of the human element. How else to explain this recent lapse in protocol, that another article of DemoWAR contraband has been discovered on the premises? A bootlegged song à la Meredith DiMenna, no less. This is disquieting.

A_Man_Needs_A_Maid.mp3

I've got no choice left but to slowly shake my head in consternation. I try to tell you men that this stuff is dangerous - you don't listen. I tell you that you're furthering the breakdown of our puritanical society - you label me a paranoid old coot. These pirate broadcasts offer nothing more than empty promises! Trust me - there are no women coming to visit you in the wee hours, bearing gifts of sonorous song and bountiful bosom. There are no maids coming to make your meals or tuck your sheets under your chin like mommy used to do. There is only a progressive weakening of your manlinesses, resulting in a feminization of the entire corps.

The truth is when you bunk down, listening to these...these "records," our squad of MACHO Operatives (Muscle Atrophy CHecker-Outers) is sneaking into your dormitories with calipers—big, shiny calipers—to sure your muscles aren't atrophying. But it turns out they are atrophying, like bananas in the sun.
Imagine you took a bicep and hollowed it out, but instead of all that bicepy stuff, you replaced it with gummy-bear gummy-stuff. And now that the temperature has hit 90°, the melty-gummy-stuff is trickling out of your pores like high-fructose sweat. So here you are stuck to your clothes, your copy of Jet magazine, a nearby picnic table and oh look, it won't be long before bees arrive. Oh god, the bees!*


So let that be a lesson learned. No golden radio voice will save you from the horrors of sticky magazines. Wait, that came out wrong. ...damnit!


*...and the horseflies! Whence these plagues were visited upon us?!

Uncharted Territory

One of the main objectives of the new ISP "information pipeline" is to establish contact with Fleet Admiral Joe Boyle, last seen adrift somewhere in the South Pacific, aiding a sea creature in need. The problem with our aim is this - Connecting with someone through the ISP is a tricky process, one requiring a great deal of skill, global positioning know-how, and a general knowledge of where the target person is. We're 0 for 3.

At this point, our intel on Boyle has been reduced to the message-in-a-bottle variety. Literally. Every three or four days we receive a missive scrunched up into a Chilean wine bottle, or some such thing, with a cryptic message that's been scrawled on a bar napkin, etched into wood chips, or in one case, watermarked on the sails of a tiny model ship. Here are a few examples to give you an idea what we're working with:

Swimming upon the Devil's lake. Right next to the Devil's ranch house. Nice horsies.

If planning to sit upon the setting sun, bring some water.

Lucky numbers are 13, 43, 64, 88, eleventy-seven.

The Devil's lake and the setting sun? Land of the setting sun? Boyle could be in the mountains of Tibet by now, a man of his resources. He could be in Tokyo. Dublin. Kenya. Hell, he could be hiding in the back row of this senate subcommittee.

He could be disguised as the clock.

To our not-so-credit.... to our uncredit, to be grammatically esuphegent, we're thwarted by the Admiral himself. He could be leading us along with these messages in bottles, in some messages-in-a-bottle-on-a-stick mind games. And the Gulf Stream could be a little more cooperative. Someone in Greenland is getting some other pieces of the puzzle, and God help us if they get their hands on a corner piece. We're going to need a bigger net... and see if you can't find the cover of the box while you're at it.

I can only assume the hobo's name is Steven.

One bottle we received contained this record, rolled into a perfect tube. The album, when extracted, popped open, blooming like a beautiful vinyl flower, completely intact and sounding like this:
The_Wind.mp3

Primary sources can be found here: CatStevens_The_Wind.mp3

We'll need every recruit's help with this one. Boyle is out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. Or he could be, you know... drinking mojitos. Either way, we need more ammo - send your own munitions and submissions to wedontneednotape@gmail.com.

New Installment: Operation Leapfrog

Everyone knows that in times of war, communication is priority one. Well, in the wake of a recent incident involving our former accounting team and a few Cayman Island tax shelters, DemoWAR budgets have been reassessed.

Updated: DemoWAR HQ Budget Priorities:
1) Pursue, eliminate enemy personnel
...
16) BoyleHunt 2000 [Ongoing]
...
23) Start saving for super-cool Acoustic Bazooka

...I'll just flip towards the end of the report:

972-c) Radio Relay Maintenance

See what we're working with? As a result, we're stuck with what I like to call "heirloom" radios, devices of such vintage and antiquity that we live in constant fear that the mobile command unit will turn into a fireball on wheels. Just yesterday, in fact, a high-pitched whine coming from the radio room caught my attention. The volume increased to the point of eyeball warbling before ending with a loud pop and a muffled "Ah Christ!" (Thankfully, earlier that week I had the foresight to call on a friend who slathered everything in my office with a flame-retardant gel. "Good timing!" I thought, as the ensuing shower of sparks bounced off my retardant gel-encased face.)

Another consequence of this mesozoic machinery is that our communiques are oftentimes... garbled. Transmissions get through, but not the way they were intended. This week I bring you one such attempt. The following were transcribed by Acting-Ensign Andreson and myself. Admiral Boyle managed to worm his way in as well, and his input was delivered by carrier pigeon not five minutes ago.

The protocol:
Message must be relayed to a soldier with no previous knowledge of the original. Soldier then reinterprets and passes along to the next recipient.

The original message:
Venus.mp3 by Television

This particular message spread like a virus. That is to say, quickly and with much mutation. It moved from Andreson...



to Dowd...


to Boyle.

And you can collect all three in one handy zip file: Venus.zip
Unless federal belts are tightened to the point of moebius strips, this could very well be a recurring series. Keep your eyes and ears peeled. (More Emma than John.)

We Emerge Victorious!

Two months ago, staffers at DemoWar HQ undertook a huge... um, undertaking. Our goal was to unite all the countries of the world (read: all God-fearing, freedom-loving countries,) in peaceful harmony. Well it seems this ground was well-trod, and so we adjusted. You do what people do, which is fail. Then you reassess, place some blame, and you better damn well adapt or die. Darwinism. Get on board, or be left in that murky tank with the coelacanth.

As a result, our already irregular posting schedule slowed to a deathly halt. Our new, revised task seemed daunting. It was of such magnitude that the whole HQ was uprooted and forced to go underground - a subterranean side-quest, if you will, that took us on a trip to the coldest place on the planet.

Burbank, CA

From the frosty North, we commenced drilling our new International Subterranean Pipeline, and now that it has been completed, with minor hiccups, setbacks, and just a couple of flipper babies, we are back ONLINE. Now I'm sure you're wondering, "DemoWar, this seems like a lot of power for one entity to hold. What exactly are you using said pipeline for?"

Well, we just wanted to have it, okay? But since you ask, we could use it for anything. We could send medicine to people in aid... Beam NATO liaisons abroad at a moment's notice... Obtain DNA information for every citizen on the pla-
Listen. There are automated shuttle-cars, you see, and jetpack dispensaries. Fiber optics are involved, somehow. Rails have been greased, as have palms. The world is our oyster, though try to imagine an oyster being tunneled through by thousands of tiny, tiny ants.

And their ant-jetpacks.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, here, and I've said too much. All you, the citizen—the loyal, law-abiding citizen—need to know is that this project has taken years off my life. So many years, in fact, that I find myself prone to bouts of buffoonery, chicanery and the general fuddruckery that comes with old age, leaving myself open to bad jokes and word plays like THIS:
Old_Man.mp3

Album art takes a backseat this week.

Get it? I feel OLD. The song has the word "Old" right in the title! And if anyone asks, no one here knows nothing about no severed underseas cables. Capice? Now who wants some hard candy? Peanut brittle? Sour balls?

Land Ho!

When last we left our fearless Admiral Boyle, he was stranded out at sea with nothing to help pass the time but his trusty guitar, a laptop, diesel generator for said laptop, seven cans of gas for said generator, a dog-eared issue of Club International* and a pringle-can wifi antenna that was spotty at best. He drifted about for a few days trying to find inspiration, some kind of muse or stimuli, a goddamn wireless signal so he could triangulate his location, something!

Now there are a lot of things in this great, big ocean of ours, and it turns out that most of them are water. You would think that this sea of endless blue would discourage, but Joe managed all right, and even found someone that he got along with:

Sweet tortoise-shell finish!

Olive was a sweet girl who found herself in a "family way" and needed some help. Knowing, as all good Navy officers do, that sea turtles of the family Cheloniidae will return to their place of birth in order to lay their eggs**, Admiral Boyle tethered his life-raft to Senorita Ridley's shell and hitched a ride. When they finally beached, Joe held her flipper and wiped her brow with a moist cloth while she dug in the sand to deposit her young ones.
Soon after, this happened:


Joe named them all Marvin.
Can you blame him? With that kind of inspiration, anyone's thoughts would quickly turn to love (and the making of.) Also, the salt-water dementia was starting to set in. It was all Joe could do to avoid stepping on the adorable little buggers as he ran to lay down this saucy little number:

Marvin, you are so close to being in a Tool video.

Download Joe Boyle's desert-island Let's_Get_It_On.mp3

And listen to the old, blurry one here: Gaye_Let's Get It On

---

*No hyperlink for that one, dirtbag.
**It's right after Basic Training, in Not-So-Basic Training.

Know it sounds funny...

...but Joe just can't stand the pain....
This week we bring you the third in Joe's continuing series of embarrassingly-dated album art. Lionel Richie's contributed Easy to the fifth Commodores record, and it served as the linchpin between their era of space-jam funk supremacy and the new wave* of easy-listening, 1980s superhits. And come on, this record cover looks just like every Chicago album.

Delta 417 to Air Traffic Control... Are you seeing this?

*apologies to The Eurythmics.

And for those of you thinking what I know you're thinking... Joe has clearly omitted the "ewwww!" going into the solo, narrowly avoiding a Cover-of-a-Cover paradox the results of which could start a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, destroying the entire universe!**

Right-click to download: Easy.mp3

Click here for the original by The Commodores or the cover by Faith No More.

Don't believe the rhinos - this is not a Faith No More cover.

Seems to me, Joe, you know Joe's done all Joe can. I can do this ALL DAY, people. I'll substitute proper names for nouns and pronouns for the rest of this post.

Joe wanna be free to know the things Joe do are right.

Hm. That didn't work as well as planned. You've got to admit, though, it's better than thinking about this:
"Joe's a brick----house... He's mighty might-ah! Joe's lettin' it all hang out..."

**Granted, that's a worse case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited to our own galaxy.

---

note: I've changed the links on this post to direct to the itunes store. In my experience, the Amazon MP3 store is a better service in that it has higher bitrates, is browser-based, and (most importantly) doesn't use any kind of DRM. But then again, these tracks weren't available at Amazon, so there's a plus mark in the iTunes column for ya. Yay, capitalism.

Sweet Baby J... Joe.

UPDATE: Joe's new version is downloadable here: Close_Your_Eyes_new.mp3


Joe Boyle inadvertantly starts off a DemoWAR with his cover of James Taylor’s “You Can Close Your Eyes” from this hippie-fest record.

You_Can_Close_Your_Eyes.mp3


Download it, ipod it, zune it, whatever. Leave some feedback.
If you'd like to hear JT's old version, it's right here.