Little late to this, but, well, you know. It's in honor of tonight's big Fu Manchu show.

My favorite rag, the Bay Guardian has been in high form lately. While I'd love to get into it, I think I'll respectfully decline out of last week's big issue, the one about "Queer Pride 2002," mainly because I'm not gay (not that there's anything wrong with it). I will only say that if words like "assimilationista" or "heteronormativity" are part of your discourse, you need to get out more.

What's been bugging me lately is other, little snippy comment's they've been making. Pop cultural-related comments.

First there was the dissing of one of my fave, not really well known bands, Fu Manchu. In a review for a local stoner rock band, High on Fire, they held up Fu Manchu as the epitome of corporate-rock stoner rock suckiness. Typical rock snot move of praising one band by dissing another in an attempt to prove just how cooler the other band is.

Quote: "Unfortunately, most bands model themelves after that logo-rock Fu Manchu bullshit." Later, the critic writes High on Fire exists- it's one of a crop of bands redeeming stoner rock's tarnished name." Tarnished where? Oh, that's right, I missed the great Stoner Rock craze that swept the nation way back in '01 when MTV and Live 105 filled the air with Stoner rock bands like Fu Manchu and Nebula. Most people have probably never even heard about Stoner Rock as a genre, but yet apparently, it's name has been tarnished.

Apparently, the local band is that much cooler than the Fu mainly because they're such a hard core stoner rock that they've released a CD with only one or two songs on it- all jammy and laden with mythological underpinnings. In other words, a band like Man O'War (who DO rock), except cool because the guys in the band don't wear mullets and are made up of upper middle class snots like the critic.

Granted, Fu's last album is no great shakes, but whatever, dude.

Oh yeah, in a search for that article on the Bay Guardian Web site, I found a number of reviews and mentions of Fu Manchu on there. Guess what? They're all glowingly, fawning and good. In fact, I think I first bought one of their album's because of a review in the Bay Guardian. Guess having a single get played for like a week on Live 105 is just enough to damn them to corporate sell-out hell.

Then there's last week's Lit Section. In the front of the section, before all the scintillating reading about the latest in gay literature, is an attack on Michael Moore. Moore is, of course, one of the only few lefty types who get any press or media coverage and right now has a best-selling book.

I quote: "Meanwhile, who else has hopped on the memoir bandwagon? None other than the ruler of liberal sellouts…..After his ode to political corrections became a runaway bestseller- gee, why would a book about white men by a white man ever become popular?…..Maybe with his fat royalty checks, Moore will open a book-writing factory in his now-infamous hometown of Flint, Mich.?"

So, according to the author, Moore is a sell-out. Why? Because he's actually read. Because that stupid Moore wrote a best-selling book and made a bunch of movies when he could be making little or no money at a free alternative weekly that nobody would even bother to pick up if it wasn't for the fact it was free and nobody really reads except for the sex advice columns. Not to mention cranky, bored unemployed people. And damn that Moore for being a white male. Doesn't he know you can only truly be an authentic, hard-core, non sell-out leftist if you are a lesbian of color?

And once again, I did a search through the Bay Guardian Web site looking for the article, but could only find a bunch of columns the Bay Guardian printed by him. In agreement with the paper's politics.

Now, if only he just wrote the free weekly's and never, ever dared to try to be read by a larger audience.