It’s time for another installment of Band Name Fodder!

I don’t watch much TV, but when I do I can’t escape those fucking direct-to-consumer drug commercials.

I really don’t get it. Big pharmaceutical companies are spending more than $4 billion annually promoting products to people who can’t buy them. You need a fucking prescription to buy this shit! And who writes prescriptions? Doctors do! And surely doctors don’t decide what to prescribe based on TV ads. Do they? Please tell me they don’t!

So the theory is that advertising will cause people who have medical problems (or think they do) to ask their doctors for the drugs they see advertised on TV, and that will cause doctors to prescribe more of the advertised drugs. It must work, because if it didn’t, Big Pharma wouldn’t continue spending so much fucking money on those ass-sucking ads. And that’s pretty scary.

What’s particularly insane is that the advertising has been successful despite the fact that the ads spend more time warning you about all the disgusting side effects of the products than they do explaining the supposed benefits. Shit, even if I were tempted to believe the puffery that the drug companies spout about their wares, I wouldn’t touch ‘em with a ten-foot pole after hearing the litany of warnings — but that obviously isn’t holding most people back.

The whole phenomenon just seems twisted and grotesque. But I’ve thought of one way to entertain myself when I’m stuck watching one of those ads: I imagine the drug names are the names of extreme metal bands, and I think about what kind of music they play — and what kind of side-effect warnings would appear on the CDs. Here are a few examples (after the jump . . .):

Every now and then we’ve told you about a word or phrase we’ve stumbled upon that has nothing to do with metal, but sounds exactly like it oughta be the name of an extreme metal band. We’ve stuck those posts under the category of “Band Name Fodder.” Now we’ve stumbled across something new: words and phrases that have nothing to do with metal but sound like they could be the names of brutal songs.

You know the kind of song titles we’re talking about — the kind that at first blush (and sometimes second and third blushes) make no sense, but just sound really evil, uncompromising, and vicious.  Songs like:

“Carrion Sculpted Entity” (Cannibal Corpse), “Megacosm of the Aquaphobics” (Cephalic Carnage), “Postmortal Coprophagia” (Devourment), “Prosthetic Erection” (Annotations of An Autopsy), “Diaboloical Submergence of Rebirth” (Goatwhore), “Intestinal Putrefaction” (Abominable Putridity), “Pestiferous Subterfuge” (Aborted), “Gestation of Malevolence” (Abysmal Torment), “Cyclopian Scape” (High On Fire), “Ceremonian Disembowelment” (Impetuous Ritual), “Gestated Human Slurry” (Infected Disarray), “Damnation Pentastrike” (Lightning Swords of Death), “Into the Qliphot of Golachab” (Malfeitor), “Fermented Offal Discharge” (Necrophagist), “Postmortem Dissection” (The Pathology), “Cataclysmic Purification” (Suffocation), “Contemporary Perception Narcotics” (Trigger the Bloodshed), “Cranial Media Parasite” (Magrudergrind). And so on.

Well, just in case the well runs dry for bands like these (or they lose their thesaurus), we’ve found a gold mine of source material. (see what we’ve discovered after the jump . . .)

I’ve taken some shit for the photo of the slit-throat turkey I used in our posts on both Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. So this time, I picked the handsome specimens above. Still metal, and still alive (at least temporarily).

I’ve been thinking about turkey because, having finished Christmas Day dinner, my body is now about 75% turkey and I’m in a tryptophan-induced coma. I got into a debate with one of my NCS Co-Authors about whether the common wisdom is correct that turkey contains high doses of tryptophan and causes drowsiness when consumed in mass quantities. IntoTheDarkness insisted that was B.S. I insisted it was true. To resolve the dispute, I consulted The Font of All Human Knowledge. Turns out the answer is sort-of yes and sort-of no.  I know you’re dying to find out the facts. Details after the jump.

Researchers have shown that people aren’t good judges of their own performance and often tend to overrate their own abilities.  Some people think they’re way better than they are, and their own sense of self-importance just oozes from every pore.  You can probably think of people like that in an instant – whether it’s someone you personally know or a celebrity you know about.  Take Dave Mustaine for example. But people can misjudge their abilities in the opposite way too.

A few days ago I was talking with someone who told me about imposter syndrome.  It’s not exactly a recognized psychological disorder, but it’s something that researchers have studied and written about.  It can be defined as a persistent feeling that you’re really not as good as other people think you are, that whatever success you’ve achieved isn’t really deserved, and that other people have just been deceived about you.  Those feelings are accompanied by a fear that your lack of competence or talent will be found out and that you’ll be revealed as a fake and a fraud.

It’s more than low self-esteem.  People with low self-esteem might actually be unsuccessful people.  People with imposter feelings actually have achieved some success, but aren’t able to recognize and value their own achievement.  And perversely, with each new success, the fear of being “found out” increases.   I’m guessing there are people in some successful metal bands out there that suffer from those fears and who can’t enjoy their deserved success as a result.  Poor bastards.

Earlier this year, the brilliant journalist Matt Taibbi wrote an article for Rolling Stone called “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine.”  It was all about how Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs has been the driving force behind every major stock market bubble since the Great Depression, including the one that led to the market collapse from which our economy is still trying to recover.  The opening paragraph of that story has stuck in my head ever since:

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

Regardless of what you think about Taibbi’s thesis, you gotta admit that’s a pretty great opening blast.  As journalistic lead paragraphs go, it’s definitely metal.  In fact, there are some great potential band names in there, don’t you think?  Vampire Squid, The Face of Humanity, Relentless Jamming, Blood Funnel, Smells Like Money.

Oops.  Looks like two of those names (IMO the best ones) are already taken!  There actually appear to be bands already out there called Vampire Squid and Blood Funnel.  And they claim to be metal bands.  Don’t know if they’re worth a shit, but they’ve got good names.

Fortunately, based on a quick Google search, the other Taibbi names still seem to be available.