International cooperation is a great thing, particularly when it involves coma-inducing food.

Last weekend, I got into a discussion on this site with Niek, the lead perpetrator of Death Metal Baboon - he’s all the way over in The Netherlands – about burgers (a subject near and dear to his heart). A post we put up at NCS featuring Goatwhore got Niek all steamed up for the stuff and in the comments on that post, he shared a recipe for richly topped burgers, including pineapple, bacon, Gouda cheese, and cheese-onion buns.

Niek went on to create the stuff, and he put up links to burger photos in his NCS comments. Well, that pushed me over the edge — those babies looked so fucking good that I had to follow suit.  I hunted down almost all the required ingredients, including the Grolsch beer that Niek included in his burger photographs, and I and 3 other ravenous gluttons made those burgers and wolfed them down for dinner. (I wrote about the whole experience here.) So far so good (and man, those burgers were awesomely good).

But then, the food coma hit with a vengeance, and it sounds like Niek got overwhelmed by one, too. Metal food is — well, it’s metal! But it’s tasty. So, Niek and I thought about naming the thick bastards — a name that ideally pays tribute both to the burger’s heaviness and its tastfulness. But we had a better idea. Niek and I decided we would let you do it!   (more after the jump . . .)

One of my largely behind-the-scenes collaborators on this site (Alexis) saw my totally random use of a loris photo in a recent post and sent me the video up above. I just about busted a gut laughing at it. It’s got nothing to do with metal, and I promise I’m not going to make a habit of showing cute animal videos on this site. Just this one time. Just couldn’t resist.

I still don’t think I’d want a pet that has hands. That would make me nervous. On the other hand, I think I’d prefer the kind of tricks this loris can do to my cat’s favorite trick — which is to jump on my keyboard while I’m in the middle of writing and delete everything.

This video has 3,117,938 hits on YouTube, which is about 3,117,900 more hits than we have on this NCS site.  Fucking lorises. I wonder if a video of someone scratching my pits would increase our traffic. I could make my eyes really wide while being scratched. What do you think?

I did find one related video on the YouTube sidebar after I watched this one. It’s the same loris, but at feeding time. This one is somewhat more metal. You can see what I mean — after the jump . . . (UPDATE: now with suitable musical accompaniment)

I’m older than the average metal blogger. Increasing age brings pluses and minuses. The chief advantage — and sometimes it feels like the only plus — is that it’s better than the fucking alternative. One of the disadvantages is that as the years roll on, you endure more deaths.

Time passes, and people die. People in your family die. Close friends die. People you don’t know but admire from afar, they die, too. Sometimes you see it coming and you can prepare. Sometimes it just knocks you down like all the air has been violently sucked from your lungs.

All deaths of people you know or people you wish you had known are painful. The most painful are the unexpected deaths, particularly when they happen in completely random, apparently meaningless ways, to people who have a lot of life left to live. Like the death of Makh Daniels, the vocalist of Early Graves.

I’ve already written more about this sad event than I probably should have, but I have  few more things to get off my chest, and then I’m done.  Promise. It has to do with whether we can take away any useful lessons from his death — or from the death of anyone.  (more after the jump . . .)

Those of us who live here in the U.S. of A. have a long 4th of July weekend ahead of us. Lots of flag-waving hoo-ha, beer-drenched barbeques, illegal fireworks, and general ignorance about the ridiculously insane, life-imperiling act that the holiday commemorates.

The self-satisfied flag-waving is something you can do when you come out on top, but I’d rather think back about what it must have been like on the original date in 1776 when all those dudes in the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence — and brought an immediate British death sentence on their heads for their revolutionary act of defiance.

Those dudes were pretty much the opposite of patriotic. They were basically yelling a full-throated “Fuck You!” across the Atlantic to the nation under whose flag they had lived and prospered, with no real plan about how to back it up when the British military machine would inevitably show up to squash them like annoying roaches.

To help get in that 1776 mood, which is kind of the opposite of patriotism, I’m gonna listen to some Pig Destroyer. Just in case you feel like a little fire-breathing metal for the Fourth, we’ve got four PD videos for you after the jump. We wish we could see your faces when you get to the fourth one.

We don’t read The Onion except when when one of our buds sends us a link — which happened yesterday. The piece we read has nothing to do with metal, but it’s just too fucking perfect not to share.  If you’ve already seen it, we’ve got another new post today below this one about a creepy new music video from a band called Criminal. If you’ve already seen that one, well, I guess we’re just shit out of luck for today. Anyway, without further introduction, here’s that piece from The Onion, which appeared under the headline, “MASSIVE FLOW OF BULLSHIT CONTINUES TO GUSH FROM BP HEADQUARTERS.”

LONDON—As the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico entered its eighth week Wednesday, fears continued to grow that the massive flow of bullshit still gushing from the headquarters of oil giant BP could prove catastrophic if nothing is done to contain it.

The toxic bullshit, which began to spew from the mouths of BP executives shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, has completely devastated the Gulf region, delaying cleanup efforts, affecting thousands of jobs, and endangering the lives of all nearby wildlife.

“Everything we can see at the moment suggests that the overall environmental impact of this will be very, very modest,” said BP CEO Tony Hayward, letting loose a colossal stream of undiluted bullshit. “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean, and the volume of oil we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total volume of water.”

Hayward’s comments fueled fears that the spouting of overwhelmingly thick and slimy bullshit may never subside.  (more after the jump, including some ghastly photos . . .)

We thought it was time for an update on The 70,000 Tons of Metal Cruise.  We’ve had so much fun with this thing (e.g., here and here) and are just counting the days until January 2011 when it limps back into port at Miami with chaos in its wake.

But just as we were checking the interwebz for updated info last weekend, we came across a few other stories about coal and China that gobsmacked us. They’ve got nothing to do with metal, and they’re only tangentially related to “70,000 Tons of Metal.” Actually, even “tangential” is stretching it. About the only connection is that the first story involves shipping clusterfuckery, and we suspect “70,000 Tons of Metal” will turn into a clusterfuck, too, though in a fun-loving, binge-and-purge kind of way.

So, before we give you an update on “70,000 Tons of Metal” (which we really will do), allow us to vent a little about those gobsmacking stories we saw.

First Item: According to this report, a large Chinese freighter carrying 72,000 tons of coal (not 70,000 Ton of Metal) ran aground late Saturday on a section of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The Shen Neng 1 crashed into the reef at full speed a few hours after leaving the port of Gladstone, Australia, on its way to China. When that happened, it was nine miles outside its authorized shipping lane, according to Australian authorities. And those same authorities reported that the ship is in danger of breaking apart.

So, what’s the big deal, you may ask? You’re thinking that coal doesn’t leak. True, but a ship this large carries a shitload of fuel — 1,000 tons of it, to be more precise. (read on after the jump . . .)

In varying degrees of intensity, your three NCS Co-Authors are all baseball fans. And for baseball fans, today is a magical day, just as it is every year, because today is Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. (Yeah, we know the fucking Yankees played the fucking Red Sox last night — and they’re welcome to each other — but that didn’t make yesterday “Opening Day”).

The slate of the preceding season is wiped clean, all things are new, and all things are possible. Of course, none of that is really true, but it’s the fate of diehard baseball fans to get their hopes up as Opening Day approaches, even when the rational part of their brains tells them to wise-the-fuck-up.

And so it goes here in Seattle. Our beloved but hapless Mariners had an unexpectedly improved season in 2009, the team was upgraded (at least on paper) in the off-season, and we’re hoping for bigger and better things this year (while trying to ignore the truly sucky offensive showing in spring training).

Off the top of our heads, we don’t know of any extreme metal songs about baseball to commemorate this occasion. Do you? But one association between baseball and metal does come to mind, so we’ll go with that. (see what we mean, after the jump . . .)

Reign in Blonde is a wonderful metal blog produced by two women (Elise and Julia), with assistance from a more-or-less regular guest contributor (Angela). I’ve been visiting that site every day for most of the last year. Along with Metal Sucks, it was the blog that inspired us to start our own. If perchance you’ve never visited RiB, quit fucking around and do it.

At the beginning of this year, RiB started a new tradition called “Panty Raid!” They issued an open invitation to people with testicles to submit metal-related guest posts, and they’ve picked one each month to feature and praise on their WALL OF PAIN. Because I like RiB, because I’m a  compulsive, Type-A, competitive asshole, and because I have testicles, I fell for it.

So, beginning a couple months ago I started writing a few words here and there when I had nothing more pressing or interesting to do (i.e., most days). I pretended I was a psychoanalyst, trying to infer stuff about the 3 contributors to RiB based exclusively on what they wrote there. And as the months passed, the thing grew and grew, like a bad case of crotch-rot. I finally decided to stop, because the piece had gotten completely out of hand. (read on, after the jump . . .)

Guess this is turning into an “off topic” day. First we had to rant about Axl Rose, and now we feel like writing about Procul Harum. We’ll get back to extreme metal tomorrow, with a little something about yet another unsigned band that’s kidnapped our heads.

For those of you who don’t live in the U.S. or who just don’t bother with anything on TV, House is an off-beat, black-humored medical drama about a borderline sociopathic doctor (Gregory House) who heads a crack diagnostic team at a hospital in New Jersey. We like it because it’s off-beat, black-humored, and borderline sociopathic.

At the end of this week’s episode, House’s colleague and sometimes roommate (Wilson) buys an organ for the house where they live. House’s face lights up like a Christmas tree as he sits down and starts noodling on the keyboard. What he begins to play is a song called “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and as the scene fades to black, the music segues from House’s noodling to the actual song, which then fades out way too soon. (more after the jump, including that song . . .)

Did you think we would forget what day it is? For shame! Of course we know. It’s the day when everyone is entitled to be Irish from sun-up until blackout.

We thought about what we might do to celebrate the day (besides getting shit-faced as soon as possible). And then it dawned on us that we had already prepared the perfect St. Patrick’s Day commemoration.We just ran it on this site about two months too soon.

So we decided to just run the fucking thing again, because it is indeed perfect. And because even if you’ve been reading our blather for the last two months, you’ve probably already forgotten the earlier post. You are, after all, metalheads.

And so, to start again. My favorite Metallica song isn’t one that would come to mind for most people. It’s an Irish folk song that’s been around for about 400 years called “Whiskey in the Jar.” It tells the story of a highwayman who robs a military or government official and is then betrayed by his wife (or lover — not clear which) and goes to prison for his trouble. And ain’t that the luck o’ the fuckin’ Irish for ye?

Metallica’s version of the song retains the traditional lyrics and the basic melody, but puts Metallica’s heavy, hard-driving force behind it — and James Hetfield’s vocals are outstanding.

The song is so catchy and has been around for so long that lots of people have recorded it. A couple years ago I tracked down different versions of the song as kind of a musical experiment, to trace the evolution of music over time, and more specifically to see how different musical genres have made this old song their own. It was a very cool experience, and one worth sharing on this drunken day.

So, after the jump, you can see the lyrics; they vary a bit, and we’re giving you the version Metallica used. And then, moving forward in time, you can stream performances of “Whiskey in the Jar” by this group of legendary bands: Irish folk band The Dubliners (circa 1967), Irish rockers Thin Lizzy (1973), Irish punk band The Pogues (playing with the Dubliners) (1990), and finally Metallica (1998). Hope you’ll get really wasted and give it a try.

And to repeat our appeal from the earlier post: It’s time for a fucking death metal band to record this song!