There are plenty of wonderful “old guy” things technology is obliterating.  For instance, back in the day I had mastered the art of the mix tape.  You’d go get a blank tape, pull out all your CDs, and spend hours recording just the right mix that you just knew was going to make a specific girl instantly fall in love with you.  Or, at the very least, give you a little awkward over the shirt action.

The rules for mix tapes were varied.  Nothing too scary, nothing too wussy.  In his book “High Fidelity,” author Nick Hornby laid out some of the guidelines:

“You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs, and… oh, there are loads of rules.”

In any event, I probably made a hundred mix tapes in my day.  Each delicately suited to whatever girl would eventually never speak to me again once receiving the tape.  But these days, there are no tapes.  And CDs are just about extinct.  So how do horny boys try to lure the ladies?  How do you get a girl to listen to a song that you’re absolutely sure is going to make her understand the turmoil in your heart (and pants?)

I think I have the answer.

Dear reader, in order to thank you for coming to this blog and to show my appreciation, I have made you a mix tape and put it here on the blog.  This is someone therapeutic for me, as I love combing through my music collection and crafting just the right playlist.  Hopefully, after listening to this first one, you’ll hop on your bike and we’ll ride together down to Open Pantry and share an Icee.

If there were a general theme for this first one, it would be singer/songwriter type stuff, since that just happened to be what I started picking out at random.  And I even kept it to the usual 74 minute CD length, too.

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Listen here, then e-mail me to tell me when you’re available to make out.

1. You Should Know So Well – Sondre Lerche
2. Beard of Bees – Clem Snide
3. Kind/ Brutal – The Heligoats
4. Finch On Sunday – Horse Feathers
5. If You Go – The Explorers Club
6. Put A Penny In The Slot – Fionn Regan
7. Streetlights – Josh Rouse
8. In the Bathroom – Trouser
9. Furr – Blitzen Trapper
10. Remember – Figurines
11. Jesus The Mexican Boy – Iron & Wine
12. Cursed Sleep – Bonnie “Prince” Billy
13. In Brilliance – Hutch And Kathy
14. Let’s Get Out Of This Country – Camera Obscura
15. I Am John – Loney, Dear
16. 3 Rounds and a Sound – Blind Pilot
17. Happiness – Elliott Smith
18. Sweet Sunshine – David Mead
19. Bookworm – Margot & The Nuclear So & So’s

I’m no fan of bachelor parties.  I wasn’t even into them all that much when I was single and it was more socially permissible to be in a strip club.  This largely stems from the trauma I suffered from going to my uncle’s bachelor party in Vegas when I was 23, while my dad was there.  We were equally as uncomforable – and I had to pretend like I never set foot in such an institution in my life:

“MY GOODNESS, WHAT IS THIS MYSTERIOUS PLACE?  MA’AM, ARE YOU AWARE THAT YOU ARE NOT WEARING A SHIRT? YOU COULD CATCH A COLD, YOUNG LADY!”

In any event, my sister in law is getting married this weekend, and I was invited to come to my future brother in law’s bachelor party.  Some bowling, the Madison Mallards baseball game, and chicanery after that.

It only took a few minutes for me to realize that bachelor parties aren’t quite what they were in the old days.  They have been altered irrevocably by technology, and for the worse.  I am talking, of course, about the prevalence of cell phones.

Now, when you go out to a bachelor party, every guy has a camera phone and text messaging ability.  This changes everything.  Back in the day, it was always understood that whatever happened at a bachelor party stayed between the attendees.  No more.

Now, any time anything of note happens, guys are either taking pictures or texting details to their girlfriends.  Even worse are the married guys (me included) who don’t give a crap, so they’re drunkenly willing to share details with the world within seconds.

For instance, I left the party at about 9:30 on Saturday night (we had been going since 1:00 that afternoon, so I thought I had put in some solid time.)  On the way to finding a cab, I ran into the bachelorette party, who happened to be out downtown at the same time.  I was peppered with questions about what had gone on:

“I heard someone got thrown into Lake Mendota.”  (Indeed, they had.)

“Why did you make the groom wear that giant yellow foam rubber cowboy hat at the baseball game?”  (Indeed, we had.)

And so on and so forth.

So here’s a lesson to those of you who have tricked some crazy woman into marrying you.  When you have your bachelor party, all the phones go in a box – not to be touched by their owners until the party is over.  No pictures, no texting, no tweeting, no phone calls.  They all must be incommunicado for the entirety of the event.  And as a thank you for this tip, you must also invite me.

As a side note, one of the attendees at the bachelor party covers the Twins for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  He actually wrote about his experience at Warner Park on his blog here.  He also happens to be a super cool dude, despite having to cover the Twinkies.

For months, people around Wisconsin have been anticipating the opening of the summer blockbuster “Public Enemies.” A large chunk of the movie was shot here in the Dairy State, and our tax dollars subsidized filming it to the tune of about $5 million.

Seeing as how I work for a full service free market think tank, I used this specious connection to go see the movie to determine whether it was tax money well spent. I feel I am doing a public service to the taxpayers to report on the fruits of their generosity (and, I admit, I was excited to see if I knew anyone in the movie, and I have an unnatural man-crush on Christian Bale.)

I was actually surprised that they made me pay for a ticket, seeing as how my tax money has made me a co-producer of this film. In fact, I’m still waiting for my director’s chair and bullhorn, and anticipate they will show up at my house any day now.

So here’s the quick synopsis of the movie:

It’s bad. Really, really bad. Closing in on awful.

It is apparent that about 20 bucks of our $5 million was spent on a script. The movie meanders along, without any interesting dialogue or insight. At 2 hours, 15 minutes, it’s about 45 minutes too long. Johnny Depp, who plays John Dillinger, seems almost to be embarrassed to be in the movie at all. Characters talk to each other with canned speeches that don’t even approach plausibility. By the time the inevitable end came, I had checked my watch about 10 times.

Perhaps the most grating aspect of the movie is Oscar winning French actress Marion Cotillard, who’s about 15% as hot as an actress that should be playing that role. Even worse is her attempt to speak English without a heavy French accent. It comes and goes, which is interesting, considering she’s playing a character who’s half Indian and who grew up in Wisconsin.

In fact, isn’t there a big movement up at the Capitol to prevent the state from contracting with foreigners for government business? There were a hundred American actresses that could have played that part – we should crack down on the OUTSOURCING OF OUR HOT ACTRESSES! (Holding hand over heart while the Star Spangled Banner plays in the background.)

For me, the only cool parts of the movie were the ones that took place in the Capitol, where I worked for 8 years. I immediately picked out the North Hearing Room, where a lot of the partisan caucuses used to take place. And I got the chills when the characters walk around the inside the Capitol.

I certainly don’t mean to dissuade anyone in Wisconsin from going to see the movie, especially if you recognize some of the sets in Columbus, Oshkosh and elsewhere. But it really is a crushing disappointment. I am amazed that big budget movies this bad can actually get made.  But who cares if Wisconsin taxpayers are out $5 million for a terrible movie?  SOME PEOPLE GOT TO WAVE TO JOHNNY DEPP!

In fact, conservatives have an opportunity here – if government-subsidized movies are this bad, imagine how bad government health care will be.  If people draw the connection, single-payer government health plans will be dead within a week.

In this most recent budget, Governor Doyle scaled back the film tax credit to $500,000. It’s a good thing for supporters of the credit that he did so before seeing “Public Enemies.” If had seen the movie in advance, he may have actually started charging movies to film here.

Perhaps most importantly, why didn’t anyone tell me that this guy from “Dazed and Confused” was in Wisconsin filming the movie?