The Friday Five: Five Rules for Choosing Your Karaoke Song

“For this I will lament and wail; I will go stripped and naked; I will make lamentation like the jackals, and cry out like the ostriches.”

…That verse from Micah (chapter one, verse eight) probably marks one of the earliest references to karaoke in the Old Testament (that’s the first half of the Bible, to all you pagans out there). The simple fact of the matter is that at some point in your life, you are going to have to sing (or at least co-sing) a song in some sort of karaoke situation. Oh sure, I’ve heard all the excuses before “I’d never let myself sink that low” “I’m too careful to end up like that” “I’m a good person”, etc. but the fact of the matter is you can either prepare mentally and spiritually for this kind of thing, or you can just live in denial and be caught totally off guard when it happens to you (and trust me, it will). Bachelorette parties, housewarmings, cookouts, bar mitzvahs…technology has progressed in such a way that karaoke can strike anywhere, at any time, and even if you take every precaution available, karaoke will find you. And when it does, karaoke will show no mercy. Luckily, I’m here for you, and if you follow a few simple guidelines, you can survive karaoke as unscathed as possible…and heck, you might even come out of it with a good story to tell.

Five Karaoke Rules that will keep you from ending up like this guy. You’re welcome.                                                     (Note: The National Anthem is not a great karaoke song choice)

Rule 1: Know your level of vocal ability.
I always think this one is a no-brainer, but then every year I see a new set of American Idol promos (I haven’t watched an actual episode of American Idol since the Clay Aiken/Ruben Studdard season, I was too hurt after watching Clay unjustly lose to ever go back…plus those types of shows are pretty played out) where an astoundingly high number of people can’t sing. It’s one thing to be blissfully unaware that you’re singing is off-pitch (shout out to whoever was standing behind me in church this week*, but you do you, homeslice), but there’s a special level of pain I feel for people that are terrible singers and have NO IDEA! Like whoever is the Paula these days will be like “sorry sweetie, you’re no good” and the contestant will be all like “Psh YOU DON’T KNOW MY WORLD SON, I’ma take my voice and go out and make a million dollars without your show! I voted green party!” and then we never hear or see them again, with the sort-of exception of William Hung, who is on national TV about as often as I am (AKA not very). The moral of the story is: it may be painful, but do whatever you have to in order to figure out how good of a singer you are BEFORE you find yourself in front of a group of people at a karaoke bar or a panel of Randy Jackson types.

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The Five Stages of When a Pretty Girl Talks to You

Spring is in the air, which means attractive women will be popping out of the woodwork left and right in your everyday life. Now don’t worry, most of these hot girls won’t even notice you, and the ones that do definitely won’t want to interact with you…however, the law of averages says that at some point a cute gal is going to need you for something (like doing her math homework or giving up your place in the movie theater line so her and her friends can see Spring Breakers, etc.), so in order to give you a fighting chance when that situation arises, I’ve written a brief guide to assist you…

Wait…why is she looking over here? Oh God, her mouth is making sounds at me, OH GOD SAVE ME!

The Five Stages of When a Pretty Girl Talks to You:

30 in 30, Day 3: Pregaming with Dustin and Jared

Something that has been on my creative to-do list for a while is to launch and maintain a podcast. For the third day of my 30-in-30 project, I have successfully done the first of those two steps.

So it is without further ado that I present to you the first episode of Pregaming: with Dustin & Jared.

Disclaimer: this is all in fun, is not meant to be taken seriously, and there maybe be a few swear words involved, so use your earmuffs accordingly. Also, it’s really freaking long. Future ones will be shorter. I hope you enjoy, please give me your feedback and I’ll try to make future installments sexier.

Podcast can be listened to:

on my website: http://web.me.com/dheveron/dustin/Pregaming/Pregaming.html

or on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pregaming/id463188794

Cheers,
Dustin

The Annual Heveron Extended-Family Christmas Party & Photo-Tour

So I got an email from my Uncle Hank a little while back, filled with all the pictures from our extended family Christmas party. Great shots of the whole family, everyone really enjoying themselves and getting into the holiday spirit, food, fun — there were even some candid shots of everybody singing around the dinner table.  There’s only one problem: I do not have an Uncle Hank. I don’t have an Uncle Hank, I don’t have a step-Uncle named Hank, I don’t have one of those close family friends who isn’t related to you but your parents refer to them as “uncle” anyway — I don’t even know anyone NAMED Hank. The closest association I have to someone named Hank is Captain Kirk’s buddy, the doctor character from the original Star Trek — a show I’ve never actually seen, but still have the misfortune of being aware of thanks to the pop-culture machine that raised me.

After a rudimentary examination of the email to make sure that it wasn’t the .00001% of spam emails that make it through both gmail’s spam filter and Apple’s junk mailbox, I saw that the fellow recipients of this Christmas recap email (which contained a whopping 21 full size picture attachments) all seemed like legit people as well. Although for the record, I’m not related to an Eileen Heveron, Margaret Heveron, or Robert Heveron, either. Now I love my family very much, but I thought it might be fun to take a photo-tour through the Christmas party of the family I’m not related to. And in an age where every embarrassing thing you do needs to be captured on the internet where it can be preserved for all time, why not post Uncle Hank’s faux pas on the blog for the whole world to see? I mean after all, any of you have better odds of showing up in these pictures than I do.

Being Really, Really Productive, You Guys

I have invented a word.

The bird isn’t the word that I’ve invented.

Oh, before I venture any further, let me quickly plug one of my fave modern-day bands, House of Heroes, by letting you know you can download a FREE song of theirs here and buy their ultra-cheap ($2.49, American! Cheaper than a ShamWow!), recently released EP here. Ok, done plugging, back to the nonsense.

Inventing a word isn’t an entirely new thing for me, since I invent words pretty regularly, the only difference is that this word isn’t a derivative of an obscenity, or slang, or innuendo for anything. So that makes it special AND appropriate for posting on the internet (because we all know what a clean and family-friendly environment the internet is).

The word came to me as I realized my life was missing a couple of vitally important functions. One, new pictures of me aren’t taken and posted on facebook as frequently as they used to be. This is a shame because I’m really, really good looking, you guys. I’m also really, really hilarious, and I often ruin improve pictures by being really, really hilarious in them.

Exhibit A:

My first thought was that I simply needed to take more pictures in general and to keep my camera on my person more often. However, I quickly realized that while this might help things a bit, it’s not a perfect solution because I wanted more pictures OF me, not more pictures taken BY me (I’m very self-centered and egotistical, to briefly recap the last 25 years of my life).

Exhibit B:

That means I needed someone else to be taking pictures of me. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, because in this situation you usually just hand your camera to the least attractive most talented of your friends and have them take it for you, but if you want a lot of pictures of yourself, this strategy doesn’t fully work either because your friend taking the picture is also usually really unpopular busy and has to leave the party early to go home and whack it study. This is especially brutal because nothing’s worse than missing classic late-night pictures like these.

Exhibit C:

And then it dawned on me. To fully realize my dream of having a lot of pictures taken of myself, without totally pissing off my circle of suckers friends, I’d need someone from outside that circle to take the photos. The solution came to me that I could pay some kind of personal assistant to take pictures of me, and they’d have to like it because I was paying them. And they couldn’t leave because I was paying them. Just like a relationship with a girl. I thought about hiring a normal photographer, but that wouldn’t be ideal because photographers are usually too arsty and concerned with what makes a “good picture” vs. what I want, which is just someone to take a bunch of pictures of me all the time.

So the word I came up with is Narcissistant. It’s an employee who works just for me, whose only job is to go around and take photos of me and post them on various websites, college cafeteria corkboards, high school newspapers, singles chatrooms, and anywhere else where the environment would be improved by displaying a photo like this one.

Exhibit D:

I don’t know how much a Narcissistant makes annually, although I’m almost certain that the payment would involve money or a close facsimile. Full benefits (wink) and a nice retirement package are all included, plus there are a ton of perks! Like for instance, I would acknowledge you in public places on a semi-regular basis, you would probably get to be friends with me on facebook, and you might even get to drive me home after I’ve had too much to drink! And that’s just the beginning, I’m sure there a ton more that I haven’t even thought of yet!

If you want to apply for this incredibly awesome, exclusive and perky job, then I probably won’t stop you! Just send me your resume, and try to be more attractive than a 7.5 on the traditional 10-point scale of hotness. Dustin Heveron Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer (no dudes, no old chicks, no weirdos, and no religions that I think are made up or lame — example: sikhs or scientologists). Apply today!

Seacrest out,
Dustin