David Van Hinklehoffen

[~Dan~]

this is great.  Go to http://www.amazon.com and search for David Hasselhoff.  Find a greatest hits cd, one with a really cheesy cover (or any Hasselhoff cd will do), and read the reviews.

Here's an example link

In 2004, Looking for … the Best became the highest rated CD on Amazon.com, receiving an incredible number of 5-star ratings. This was the culmination of a spontaneous internet joke that has been going on for several years, in which Amazon customers review the album. Almost all give it 5 stars and pen sarcastic reviews which include egregious misspellings of Hasselhoff's name and usually end with the phrase, The song "Hot Shot City" is particularly good!.

Selected highlights-

Once in every generation you have gifted musical and literary geniuses who create bodies of work that can only be described as sublime transcendence. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy - this pantheon of greatness can only be complete with the addition of none other than David Hasselhoff.

In terms of his contemporaries, forget clowns like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits. The Hass-man blows them away. People will be studying and enjoying his poetry and music for generations.

But something about the man on the cover intrigued me. A quality I had seen before in others, John Lennon, Jimmy Hendrix, Elvis, Jesus. Overcome with, well I cant really describe it, I placed the compact disc tenderly in the tray of my 1993 original PanMax ghetto blaster and pressed Confabulate. The effect was instantanious. As if caressed by the most serene of angels my eardrums responded by rising in sweet symphony to the crests and troughs of His vocal sirens. Knees weak, i managed to make it to the couch where i slumped as i seen junkies do years before. Slowly my life force was being sapped, but not in a bad way, I was becoming...I was seeing for the first time, hearing for the first time. Then Hot Shot City started to play. As if sitting on my fathers lap for the first time Dammerhingers voice tenderly trailed the length of my neck, raising each hair on my body in an organic ode to greatness. It was done. I had found what I was looking for. The chase for the white dragon was over and I have only one person, one being to thank.

As the centuries wear on so too shall St. Hasselhoffenheimer in the canon that is graced with the likes of Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Falco.

I've been a worshipper of Durgen Hummersnarf ever since I accidentally got a plane to Hamburg and every single airline radio station was playing back to back Hasselhoff hits.

In the year 3004 historians will sight this album as catalyst for world peace for once you've listened to this album you have no choice but to marvel and honour the greatness of mankind.

Little did I know what was to come. As track 6, Hot Shot City, kicked in, I experienced what can only be described as a convulsive fit of pure happiness. Coming to, I was aware that in my ecstasy, I had broken every piece of furniture in the room. I now knew that life would always be this good, whenever I put on Looking For... the Best of David Hasselpfft.

Thousands of reviews, all of them fake, and very funny.  I'm not sure who started it, maybe somethingawful, b3ta or fark.

[Foxy Brown]

If you like wacky Amazon reviews, you should also check out the Family Circus books. Upon searching, it looks as though a lot of them have been removed, but here are some remaining examples:

What Does This Say? : Family Circus

There is a certain sadness one feels in remembering happy times: turning over the last page of a good novel, and reflecting over the wonders we have just experienced, the characters who have become our friends; discovering old pictures, seeing ourselves in the halcyon throes of youth, silly smiles on our innocent faces; the plangent last notes of a Chopin nocturne, the theme, growing softer and softer now, floating across the room to rest against our face like the rhythmic breaths of a peaceful, sleeping lover.

I don't know how: but Keane captures this feeling, this happy sadness - "Oh heavy lightness," as Shakespeare put it. Billy romps around the yard. He runs all over town. His parents are in love. His family is love with itself, each unto each. Can our lives ever be like this? Perhaps not, but we can watch, watch ever single day, and wrap ourself in that happy sadness. And maybe forget, if only for a little while, the way our lives really are, the way they have to be: our heavy lightness. Thanks, Bil Keane, for that, and thanks to Amazon for letting people express themselves. Thank you all.

Yeats once wrote, "None other knows what pleasures man/At table or in bed." Bil Keane, however, seems to have found in his latest 'Family Circus' opus a treasure-chest of pleasures for each and all of us.

There are some who chafe at the seeming repetitive themes within Keane's major works; I would respectfully submit that all great stories are about life and death, love and loss, fear and triumph. If not Keane, then so go Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and Callimachus, too, for good measure. It is not originality that spawns thought and wonderment; it is the vessels of those themes (Billy, Grandma, Barfy, PJ) that inspire and enlighten.

Keane, as carrier of these vessels, reminds us of a truth so eloquently immortalized by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Some books leave us free and some books make us free." In 'What Does This Say', it is clear that the tome achieves the latter, with gusto and aplomb.

Smile! with the Family Circus

Though universally popular with critics, Smile! has never been commercially successful. It's been in and out of print -- mostly out -- so this hardcover 30th anniversary edition is an especially welcome event to discerning FC readers.

Along with his day job with United Features Syndicate to produce the more commercial Family Circus strips we know and love, Keane labored on Smile! on evenings and weekends from 1966 through 1972 in a cathartic period when he confided to friends that he had to complete Smile! before the effort killed him.

Smile! is Keane's FC adaptation of the legendary unreleased Beach Boys album of the same name. Keane met Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks at the Fillmore West in late 1966 and quickly the three became inseperable. The next six months were a happy, artistically productive time for the three, and it's during this time that most of the widely-bootlegged Smile! demos were recorded. Unfortunately Parks and Wilson had a falling out in February 1967, after each discovered that Keane had been sleeping with the other, and the lovers' betrayal ended the Beach Boys' Smile! sessions. Wilson spent the next year in solitude, finally giving up on Smile! without giving a public explanation. Keane, having been spurned by both Wilson and Parks, returned to the comfort of the Family Circus to lick his wounds.

Some critics have derided Keane as "the Beach Boys' Yoko Ono" for his unfortunate role in the Smile! sessions. Nevertheless, Keane's book remains the only fully-realized version of the work that the three men envisioned together in late 1966. Music historians trying to guess how the bootlegged Smile! demos would have been pieced together need look no further than this book.