A threat against mankind to rival Dr. Evil’s Alan Parsons Project laser? Faaa-bulous! A watchdog group that tracks military spending recently stumbled across a 1994 U.S. Air Force proposal for a hormone weapon that would turn exposed soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex and antiquing than fighting'yes, a Gay Bomb. “The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistibly attractive to one another,” Edward Hammond of the investigating Sunshine Project told CBS 5 News in Berkeley, Calif. “The notion was that a chemical that would probably be present in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soldiers would become gay.” Hasn’t a form of this been available for years commercially as Bacardi Silver?
About the big Sopranos finale last Sunday: Writer/director David Chase never delivered a “conventional TV” episode over six seasons, so why the hell were you expecting one all neatly gift-wrapped in the end? Quit your bitching, don’t cancel the HBO subscription (like you were going to anyway) and get into Big Love, which I predict will'albeit slowly'develop into the network’s new buzz drama (sorry, John From Cincinnati). Me, I thought the final Sopranos was brilliant, and I’m now looking forward to a future free of hack TV critics throwing around the phrase “Fugeddaboutit.â€
Chances are City Weekly grand poobah John Saltas, currently vacationing in Europe, has not yet seen the final Sopranos episode, so don’t say anything'fortunately, there are no spoiler blogs out there on the Wide World of Web. You’re being deprived of his Private Eye column this week, but you can read about his adventures and peruse his photos at CityWeekly.blogspot.com, the relatively lively arm of City Weekly’s current zombie-like Website (the new one’s coming, really'our current trial version from Playskool is about to expire).
Last week, Frost Bytes told you Salt Lake City’s Royal Bliss had signed to Capitol Records'now, more news of local bands getting inked: Stoner-rock outfit Iota has landed a deal with Detroit indie Small Stone Records; their label debut is due out sometime in 2008. Meanwhile, SLC singer-songwriter Jake Jacobson has struck an unusual distribution deal via Seattle digital media company eTagz: His single “She’s So Whoa” will be part of a free CD attached to 500,000 copies of the July issue GamePro magazine. And how’s Orem screamo-neers The Used’s third Warner Bros. release, Lies for the Liars (which debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard charts last week), faring in the national press, since the copy City Weekly received was too anti-rip-encrypted to actually play? “Unreasonably pleasurable pop-punk sing-alongs from a fearless band of weirdoes,” raved The New York Times, while the New York Daily News wrote it off as “more generic emo.” Which guarantees you’ll be hearing it on the radio all summer long.
