My Incestry.com Results Came In (I’m 6% Neanderthal...Yeah!)

I recently received the DNA lab results from Ancestry.com. A few months ago I decided to exam my heritage to find out if my enormous penis intelligence was somehow genetically linked to anyone famous . It turns out it is, if by famous you mean well known for committing crimes. Well, not really crimes, just being drunk a lot in public.  But more on that later. Here are my results:

According to their analysis, I’m mostly central European, which I pretty much already knew. What did surprise me is that it turns out I’m 6% Neanderthal.  Which I guess shouldn’t shock me considering I do have the occasional caveman tendencies like hogging the remote, drinking milk from the carton, and running into caves swinging my club yelling “Gaur demands the women and wine!” But I guess the real surprising part to me was learning the fact that modern humans, also known as Homo sapiens, had sex with something technically considered a different species. But then again I’ve had pretty nasty sexual encounters with some women that could fall into that category so who am I to judge what our ancient ancestors considered ‘do-able’. So here’s where the real interesting part comes in. I get a message from Ancestry telling me they found documents matching our family surname to a well known man from Scotland named William McBrody (somehow the Mc got dropped from our last name within the last hundred years) and they were excited to share the news. In my delight I’m thinking “Wow, am I related to a king? A nobleman? A knight? Someone with money I could inherit?” Anything is better than the clan I grew up with. Turn out this William McBrody wasn’t exactly the bourgeoisie gent I had imagined. Although he was well known in parts of Glascow, this McBrody was more famous for his drunken escapades than any righteous endeavors. Think of him as the medieval version of Otis, the town drunk of Mayberry. Apparently they were able to dig up an old manuscript that contained the criminal records of those incarcerated in the kings jail, and that’s how they indentified our famous infamous relative. It reads (transcribed from Latin)

On this day, March 5^th of 1562, William McBrody was arrested and dutifully charged with “Public Loudness under the influence of Drink.”

And another…

On this day, August 16^th of 1564, William McBrody was arrested and dutifully charged with “Possession of a Stolen Steed (horse) while causing Public Loudness under the influence of Drink.”

And again…

On this day, April 23^rd of 1565, William McBrody was arrested and dutifully charged with “Defecation with Injury” (you can interrupt that how you want) with, you guessed it, “Public Loudness under the influence of Drink.”

But my favorite has to be:

 On this day, May 9^th of 1566, William McBrody was arrested and dutifully charged with “Public Blasphemy of the King” (under the influence of drink no doubt). Turns out a group of the royal soldiers came through the village tavern singing the praises of Charles II, then king of Scotland. After leading the entire bar in three choruses of “God Bless our King!” McBrody interrupted the festivities by singing his own version of the Latin song, replacing the lyrics with “Pedicabo Equos Regem!” which, loosely translated means “The King Fucks Horses”.  Not surprisingly, the royal soldiers were not amused. After serving 23 days in jail and fined, ironically, three Scottish crowns (the name of the currency back then), McBrody was allowed to return home a free man, albeit leaving whatever pride he had left. The story does have a happy ending however. Although some may say a lesser man would be broken after years of drinking and petty crime, William eventually bounced back and married at the ripe ol’ age of 32, which was pretty late back in those days. His wife, a well-to-do maiden named Mary McCain, would turn out to be my mothers great, great, great, great, great, grandmother. Although not extravagant or royally connected, their family were known as affluent land owners and highly educated for the time. Although someone apparently dropped the ball along the way considering the house I grew up in was closer to a shoebox than a castle.   

So what have I learned from all of this? Today we have amazing technology at our fingertips that allow us to trace our heritage right down to the exact location on our planet. We can share our thoughts and ideas about what we’ve learned from our ancestors with others across the globe. But most importantly, I’ve learned to never be afraid to confront your past, even if it may involve a little bit of “Public Loudness under the influence of Drink”.

Find your inner Neanderthal today by visiting Ancestry.com

I Was a Victim of Child Slave Labor (well, for 3 hours)

The video below shows where I grew up (that brown house in the midwestern paradise known as south-side Chicago). I'm telling a story as I'm driving but it cuts off so I thought I'd tell the complete story here. When I was about 11 or 12, a guy approched me while I was out delivering newspapers and asked if I wanted another job. He said I could make more money working for him than what I was doing. I told him that I'd think about it and he handed me a card with his name and number on it. The next day I decided to give him a call and he gave me directions to his house. (Before I go any further... no I didn't get 'touched' or anything like that.)When I got there he asked me to fill out some paperwork and than asked me how much I wanted to make. I just remember him saying "Is $1.25 an hour okay? It adds up, trust me." While my brain wanted to say forget it, for some reason all that came out was "Ahh..I guess. Sure." Next thing I know he walks me down into his basement where I see maybe 10 or 12 other kids around my age standing around tables doing various tasks like stuffing envelopes and doing data entry. I was given the job of stuffing cardboard tubes with letters and affixing mailing labels to them. Not exactly hard work, but I just remember thinking, how long does he expect me to sit down here? Should I tell my parents about this job? Every fifteen minutes he would come down and berate one of us for no real reason. He made one of the girls cry. His breath smelled really bad. He was like a combination of my creepy uncle and a teacher at our school that everyone hated. Twice he yelled at me, first for sitting on a chair while stuffing these tubes, and the second for reading what was on the mailers (At the time I didn't understand the letter, looking back now I think it was some kind of pyramid scheme). After about 3 hours I asked to use the bathroom and he told me "Make it quick".  So I decided to quit, but not before dropping a deuce in his toilet and forgetting to flush. I left and never told anyone about this guys little neighborhood work factory. About a year later I was at this gas station my friends and I would go to after school to hang out and as I'm pulling change out of my backpack the card that guy gave me falls out. I show it to the lady working behind the counter and tell her my story and she see's his name and says "Yeah, I know that guy. He went to prison about six months ago for scamming elderly people out of their savings." TTFN.

My Other Hobby...

This is what I do when I'm not working as a writer. I guess I'd consider the drums the 'treadmill' for creative people.  Try doing this for an hour and not sweating.

The Worst Gig I've Ever Played?

A Bunch of Old Crap I Still Use

Let The Celebrity Literary Battle Begin!

I Bought Stephen King’s Automobile

I’ve owned over 25 cars in my lifetime. Some were good, some were bad, but one in particular… well if you’re ever seen the Stephen King film Christine, about the possessed car from hell, yeah it was like that. It was a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited. Black on Gold with every option. This was the only car I ever purchased from a car dealership and this is why. Every two weeks something was breaking down on this car and it was costing me thousands to fix. It had one of those remote starts on the key fab, which is great when you come from a place where its cold and rainy all the time. But a few days after buying it, it would turn itself on in the middle of the night. I was living in an apartment and I would hear its start. It had a big 318 V8 Mopar engine and the lights would flash and it would start itself. Yeah, it was freaking me out so I took it to Best Buy of all places to have a new stereo installed and asked them to remove the factory radio and the remote start. I go to pick the car up and the guy told me every time he went to remove the wires it would shock him. Eventually he got the old components out and when I got it home now the alarm was going off by itself and the car would lock me out. About a week before I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, the transmission went out. I took it in to a mechanic and he put a refurbished transmission in it and told me if anything went wrong I had 30 days to brink the car back. Of course after a week I was ready to move and drove it to the west coast. Three days after I arrived, the transmission went out again. This time it was just the reverse so I could still drive it I just couldn’t park in any place that I had to back out of.  I couldn’t drive the car back to Chicago to get my money back so I was out $1000 bucks. So I’m at a gas station in Irvine CA, and as I’m coming out of the store the car starts heading towards me. I run up to the door and its locked me out again. At this point it’s still moving and I’m scared it gonna ram into the store so I run over to the other side and open the passenger door  to pull the keys out and that’s when I realize the keys are in my pocket! The car had started itself again. I shove the emergency brake on and put it in park right before it runs into the store.  At this point I’m completely stressed and decided to put it on Craigslist and just take a loss. I place an ad selling it for $2000 and say in my post that the transmission has no reverse and then I jump in the shower. By the time I come out, I have 14 voice mail messages on my phone. I answer the very first one and the guy tells me he’ll be at my house in 30 minutes.  He never arrives so I figured he flaked so I call back the next guy and he says yeah I live down the street from you so I’ll come over right now. While he’s test driving the car the other guy shows up and is pissed because I didn't hold the car for him and I told him "Listen, you told me you'd be here in 30 minutes, it’s been over an hour and you never called me or anything. Sorry."  He offers me $300 more than what I'm asking for if I agreed to sell the car to him when the guy gets back. And I’m thinking what am I supposed to tell the other guy if he comes back and wants to buy it? Break my word and be like oh this guy just showed up and offered me more. So I tell him that if this guy doesn’t want it it’s his. He says “What the fuck asshole?” walks back to his car and the other guy comes back and says he’ll take it so he pays me the money and a week later I see him at that same gas station getting gas in his car and I walk up to him and say "Hey, where’s the Jeep?" He tells me a story about how after he gave me the money, the other guy followed him back to his house and offered him an additional $300 for the car so he sold it to that guy because apparently the heated seats started turning themselves on while he was driving and they were so hot they were burning his back. He couldn’t get them to shut off and the car was doing other weird stuff like the headlights were turning on and stuff. So I thought to myelf okay, at least this nightmares over and I shit you not less than a month later I’m watching the news and they showed a story about a guy whose car accelerator got stuck and the car drove itself off the 125 freeway off ramp into the water and trapped the driver and he drowned. When they showed the car being pulled out of the water it was my Jeep Grand Cherokee! So yeah, that thing needs to be burned and buried forever. On a side note, I told my buddy about this story last year (he was the guy who used to work at the car dealership that I bought it from) and he goes, "Yeah I remember that car. The guy who traded it in just wanted to get rid of it and didn’t care what we gave him for it and when I was prepping it I was under the car changing a filter and the jack gave way and the car came down almost crushing my head." Im like thanks for letting me buy it. I am now convinced I owned a haunted automobile.

Yeah… I was that guy.

So what did I do before I became a writer and comedian? Remember that douchebag from your high school that walked around acting like he was black? No, that wasn’t me, but pretty close. I was actually a hip-hop DJ. I’m not fucking kidding. When most people think of DJ’s nowadays they think of Avicii, Deadmaus, Calvin Harris, etc. But this was the 90s. Music like 2 Live Crew and Sir Mix-a-Lot were the rage. When I was 16 I went to a dance party and noticed two things out of place. #1) The guy playing the music was ugly. #2) The girls around the guy playing the music were not ugly. A light bulb went off in my head, and then shorted out. I instantly came to the conclusion that if you can make someone dance, that was a good thing. I started out with speaker equipment I borrowed from my uncle who played in band, and bought turntables and a stack of old vinyl from a Mister Money pawnshop my cousin worked at. I taught myself how to mix. Soon I was playing basement parties around our neighborhood. Within two years, I was playing bars and clubs around the University of Chicago. During the day I was taking art classes at a local community college, and then I would take a bus downtown and play music all night, sometimes not getting home until the morning. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but it was fun considering I wasn’t even old enough to be in most of these bars. That’s where I got the name DJ Kidd. People thought I was nine years old, so I always wore a hoodie and grew stubble (hence the pic). Soon after I turned 21, a rep from Anheuser-Busch came out to see me and signed me to a promotional contract. It was a program called True Music Live. They had bands also, one of them was an up and coming group from Chicago called Fall Out Boy. As part of the deal, I had to promote Budweiser products. In fact, the day Dale Earnhardt died, I was performing NASCAR trivia at a karaoke event when I heard someone yell, “Hey, turn the music down, The Intimidator crashed!”As I looked down, my next trivia question was, you guessed it, “How many races did Dale Earnhardt win?” I guess to make up for pulling me out of class to play at these daytime tractor pull events, once a month they would FedEx a box full of Fubu sweaters and some hats with whatever company uses that elephant logo. I felt like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but more like Eminem at night and Larry the Cable Guy during the day. Eventually I lost my sponsorship after showing up at a regional directors meeting in Sun Prairie Wisconsin high on Ecstasy (you can hear that story on my podcast).

 As I got older and more into writing, I decided it was time to move on. After many drinks, a few few late nights, and much reckless behavior, I moved to California at the ripe ol’ age of 25. Occasionally I still perform at events, although these days they are much more reserved (hence the other pic). Who knows? If you see me someday at your wedding supplying some fat beats, come up and say hi. Just please don’t call me DJ KIDD. 

You've Been Masturbating Wrong! - [Crazy Russian Hacker Parody]

Tanner Blaze is Back !

Herpes at Church!

I got into a Twitter war with Taylor Swift's Guitarist

Okay, let me just start this post off by saying I don't completely hate pop music, or country music, or rap music. I respect all genres. I really do. But I'm a rock guy, plain and simple. I play a real instrument. I write real songs with real musicians. So what I saw the other day just made me run to Twitter... and oh how I wish I hadn't. After watching Taylor Swift perform live on TV, two things stuck out. First, I realized I knew her guitar player (Grant Mickelson - we went to the same high school), and two, his guitar wasn't even plugged in. (In all fairness, he may have been using a wireless transmitter.) Then, I realized something else. Are there even guitars in Taylor Swift's music? I mean, the old stuff sure, you hear some. But the new stuff? It's all programmed drivel. EVERYTHING. What happened to real instruments? So I followed Grant on his feed and within the course of maybe 6 weeks, he posted picture after picture of guitars that I could only dream of owning. "Hey guys, I just picked up this killer '59 Les Paul Gold-Top once owned by Jimi Hendrix.. see you at the next show Tokyo!" FML. Remember the guy in school whose parents bought him that super fast sports car and a week later he wrecks it so they buy him another one? Or he ends up burning out the clutch on his Mustang because he never learned how to drive a stick shift? Grant is this Napoleon looking, eye liner wearing, spandex leather clad wannabe douchebag who stands up there pretending to play rock star every night because he happened to make the right connections in Nashville or wherever the hell Big machine Records collected her backing band from. While real Napoleon looking, eye liner wearing, spandex leather clad musicians like Ratt and Poison are regulated to playing county fairs and have to work day jobs. In all honestly, I don't hate Grant, I actually think he's a smart guy and hell... if I was asked to play guitar for Kelly Clarkson or Rhianna, sign me up because I could use those checks. I just wish pop tarts like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry would stop trying to act like they need a band of teenage wannabe hipsters with expensive clothes and vintage instrumnents behind them to add credibility to their songs. Come on, we all know mega-producers like Dr. Luke and Max Martin wrote those tracks for you. Yeah, I'm a bit jealous. And I should have kept my mouth shut about it. After throwing a couple of barbs back and forth it wasn't long before Taylor Swift's personal fan club army of 14 year old girls came after me and let me have it with some serious trash talking. I even had to close my Twitter account. So there you have it. Taylor 1: Luke 0. I learned my lesson. But Grant, next time the band is in town, let me come up on stage for just one song. I promise I'll plug in for it.