Smarty Pants sandwich shack hates my guts. I went in today with Jessie Martin to get things to go. It went like this:

Me: Can I order a sandwich to go?
Sandwich Person: No, you are not welcome here.
Me: Eeks, why?
Sandwich Person: You wrote something really terrible about this place and the owner is very mad.
Me: Who, me?
Sandwich Person: Yes, he is very mad.
Me: Really? You're banning me from the sandwich shack?
Sandwich Person: Yes, and I suggest that you leave. (getting mad)
Me: Really? Are you being serious?
Sandwich Person: Yes, I am very serious. (getting madder)
Me: Really? I am being kicked out of the sandwich shack?
Sandwich Person: Yes, I suggest that you leave immediately. (getting maddest)

With that we left, while half laughing. I couldn't imagine what exactly I could have written that was so bad, bad enough to get me kicked out of the sandwich shack. Soon after, I did remember what I said about the sandwich shack. It was really bad! They shouldn't allow me back in that sandwich shack! At first I argued that perhaps they shouldn't let Caperin' Derek into the sandwich shack, but indeed, real life Derek shouldn't be allowed back in the sandwich shack. Fictional Mariners-era Rollie Fingers loves sandwiches, and he will also no longer go to that sandwich shack.

• Alas, make sandwiches at home!

Later in the evening I decided that I didn't need that sandwich shack, because you can just make sandwiches at home. I then invented a sandwich called Banned From Smarty Pants. You'll see that it is easy to construct. It is simply wheat bread (I prefer the Brownberry wheat type, but live your life how you want) with natural peanut butter and Grape Nuts. Serve this sandwich open-faced, garnish with M&Ms. Oh, and you have to sing this Bad Brains song when you make it, but change the words and make it about sandwiches. Voila! Sandwich shack in your kitchen!

• If you ban us from your sandwich shack, it's the right time with the right mind.

Remember last week when somebody made a bunch of fake newspapers and put them into paper boxes? OH MAN, THAT RULED! It seems they were numbered in an edition of 25 and I have #1 and #2 from said edition and they are for sale for $100 each, which includes shipping. If you would like to buy one, contact away.

• UH OH: #1 & #2

The summer when I was 14 was when I fell in love with girls. Ericka Stadnick, Stacey Cooper & Amy Rasic to be exact. It seemed like everybody was falling in love and skateboarding and fist fighting all around me in Berea, Ohio. It was the summer that everybody I knew listened to the Violent Femmes on cassette, everybody had a copy of it and knew every note. I was glad while working record stores years later to discover that 12-15 year-olds were still buying it. It is a record of transition into the awkward teen stage when you're not yet wild but not yet broken. Other people have stories about this record too, not just people in Ohio! Wait, some of these people are from Ohio:

Lars Finberg: My parents sent me to a 'gifted' summer camp in Greely, Colorado in the 7th grade. I got in because my aunt was tight with the directors and for my entrance application after the question 'why do you want to go here?' I answered in all caps: 'CAUSE MY PARENTS ARE MAKING ME AND MY AUNT KNOWS THE DIRECTOR'. I got in, loved it, got my left ear pierced with a needle and a coke can, touched my first boobs (w/o kissing and super awkward) and had the two prettiest girls I've ever seen teach me how to huff rubber cement out of a plastic bag after a roller skating party while the Femmes played in the background and melted my mind. For our extracurricular music class we formed the band Folk You and covered "Blister In The Sun" (just the riff for 10 minutes) and BROUGHT THE HOUSE DOWN. I would imagine it's the same or close to for most 14 year olds with taste or purpose.

Andrew Huff: When I was in high school, one of my saviors was a black cassette tape with a little cut-out piece of label that said Violent Femmes in black and purple ink. The tape contained a dub of Violent Femmes’ first album, taped over my brother’s (also dubbed) copy of Def Leppard’s Hysteria. When I was in a bad mood—pissed off at my parents, brokenhearted over some girl, or upset about some probably superficial slight—or if one of my friends was, we’d jump in the car, pop that tape in the stereo and drive aimlessly round the countryside, venting our spleen and singing along at the tops of our voices. Vent we did, wasting gas and terrorizing empty roads between moonlit pastures north or west of town, shrieking out “Add It Up” or sing-songing through “Please Do Not Go.” I know every word to every song on the album—there aren’t many songs that I know all the words to, let alone any other albums. So thanks Gordon Gano, Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenzo, for making it easier to take out my frustrations.

Jacob StrawberryKnabb: In 5th grade I was in the high school production of A Christmas Carol as Tiny Tim. I was overwhelmed to be hanging with older kids & also to have two solos in the show. Right before opening night, we had a pizza party for the cast and I remember sitting on the shoulders of the guy playing my father & munching pepperoni pizza while the backstage guys blasted Violent Femmes' 1st album. I hadn't ever heard anything like it & I didn't know how to feel. The cursing, the raw sexuality, and the gender confusion Gano's voice elicited left me feeling frightened but also deadly curious. I'd been raised in the church & knew that the songs were about bad things & it totally blew my mind. I had no clue who it was I was hearing, only that it was what high school kids listened to and it wasn't until I was also in high school that I heard them again. I bought Add It Up & devoured the music & have been a fan ever since.

David Williams: I associate this record with a particular summer in college, in Denton, TX, with my first girlfriend who had fake breasts. They were cold, as was she. She cruelly flipped back and forth between me and a handsome design student who was one of the dimmest, pinky-blue new wave dudes I've ever met in my life. I bet he's still wearing chunky sweaters. One morning I awoke in her bed with a fresh litter of kittens between my legs. She played this record all summer. This and the god-damned Fixx. Why did you make me remember this, Derek?

Steve Five: I used to listen to it on the bus going to Catholic school at St. Thomas Aquinas in Canton. At first I listened to it so this older girl, Melissa Cimino, would notice me, because she had a Violent Femmes t-shirt. But I then ended up liking the album because it is great.

Andrew Robbins: I remember driving through downtown Berkeley packed seven deep in a Toyota Tercel. We were looking for a vegetarian diner we had heard about and "Kiss Off" came on the radio. We each took turns for the verses and then we all sang the chorus... at the same time, loudly. Afterward we had vegetarian hot dogs, the place we were looking for was actually in Oakland though.

Tim Cook: Winter break, 1983, Boise, ID. 8th Grade: A classmate's parents were out of town, thus a party happened. Debauchery (wine coolers and making out) was going on. My punk friend was there, her name was Wendy. Wendy was someone I thought of as a real punk, someone who joined me in a two person boycott of the cultural event of the era, the Thompson Twins/Berlin concert at the Boise State Pavilion, and someone who really cared less about belonging than I did, which at the time I thought was very little. We were kind of an anti-social team at West Jr. High. She didn't drink wine coolers or make out with people i knew, she only drank beer and kissed older, high school dudes. With everyone else at the party mackin' or suckin' on a Bartles and Jaymes, Wendy started scream-singing "Add It Up" from that Violent Femmes cassette (which I bought from lawn mowing proceeds the previous summer and had dubbed for her). I remember asking, "you like that band, Violent Femmes?" "Yeah," she said, sipping A BEER. Whoa, Wendy liked Talking Heads, Devo, Flipper, XTC, Dead Kennedys, Black Flag AND Violent Femmes. Wendy's approval made me like that band for real. Until the next record, HOLLOWED GROUND. And then came those solo records and new bands; Those were all stinkers, we thought. And then came the Demme and Hughes movie soundtracks and ensuing popularity and the band is mostly just irrelevant and whiny/annoying. But hey, we'll always have Add It Up.

Reilly Lambert: My cousin played it for me. I demanded we listen to it again. After, she showed me how to smoke cigarettes properly. I got a huge buzz from my first cigarette. I was 13.

John Atkins: Gateway drug.

Gregory Jacobsen: A BMX freestylin' friend dubbed most of this album on a cheap cassette along with some stuff from Dead Kennedys' Plastic Surgery Disasters. I'm glad these two albums were part of my introduction to punk because they are both strange. I remember sitting in my basement, sneaking cigarettes, listening to this. I thought their name was pretty extreme. It did evoke "eww"s from a spandex-clad Cinderella-lovin' friend (it's funny, now her son plays this song in his high school band). At the time, 8th/9th grade, I was looking for the weirdest music possible and this record taught me that you didn't have to be Nuclear Death to be strange and other-wordly. Funny that it has now become the soundtrack to blandness. I bought something else from them at the time...it was terrible. I tried to like it. Inside the cassette, they were posing with fish on their arms if I remember right. I wanted to like it BECAUSE of that photo...but, no, it was awful.

Nicole Berland: A lady i didn't know squeezed my butt while i was watching the Violent Femmes play "Add It Up" at a music festival in Birmingham, AL when i was a young teenager.

Gina Kaye Williams: Other than the memory that this was one of those albums that was so different than anything I had heard previously, I have dark memories. The dark part: my long time junior high/high school boyfriend turned me on to this and at first it was a cool discovery that we shared. Soon thereafter, I thought my world was coming to an end because I discovered he had been cheating on me with this trashy slut that had bullied me years ago. And THAT Violent Femmes cassette was HERS, I believe! (Or she turned him onto it or whatever). So I could just picture: just as he and I would drive around & listen to it in his Volkswagen van, he was simultaneously driving around in her trashy Z-28 or Iroc Z or whatever the hell white trash car she had, grooving to the same sounds with HER. To this day that record creeps me out.

Kerri Harrop: In 1985, they played 2 shows in one night at the legendary Gorilla Gardens and I went to both, based on the strength of this record, which had been out for a couple of years by then. Notable: #1 Street musician Richard Peterson ("No Canadian Coins") opened both sets. #2 I am pretty sure this is the night that the fire dept showed up and were going to shut down the (sold out) 10pm show, because the venue did not have enough fire exits. This prompted the promoters to chainsaw an exit to appease them. #3 Leaving the 7pm show and getting right back in line for the 10pm show seemed like a teenage dream come true.

Joe Losurdo: WNUR used to play their demo like crazy around 1981 or 82. It had most of the tunes on the first LP. I loved it! One of those perfect teen-angst records that also re-enforced the coolness of the bass guitar. But I was thoroughly bummed out when every girl in my high school picked up on it a few years later, smoking cigarettes at parties and bouncing around to "Add It Up," and me thinking "You bitches are the source for these songs!"

Kelly O'Neil: This played on repeat in my first car, a '78 Ford Pinto, during my high-school boyfriend's summer-long bad check writing spree. He'd write a bad check for a bunch of clothes and expensive shoes, then I'd return the stuff and get the cash, then we'd buy weed. We'd drive out to the woods to smoke it, listening to Femmes the whole time. He went to jail that fall. JC Penny is nothing to fuck with.

Calbee Mundy: I got home one day and my girl friend at the time had bought me this tape and The Replacements Tim and then a week later broke up with me and broke my heart.

Tara Thomas: I was in 8th grade, I listened to album on headphones taking Metro bus for the first time , to meet the boy i had a crush on at Sea-Tac Mall in Federal Way. He was in 7th grade, and tried to impress me by doing ollies on the carpeted floors of the mall. I still think about him every time I hear the first three songs on album. and the gross carpets at Sea-Tac Mall.

Aram Shumavon: I think this album single-handedly got me laid for the first time and kicked out of camp in the summer after 8th grade. The girl was older than I was, from Akron and in a camp for smart kids entering their junior year in high school. I was in a sports camp even though I was staying all of three blocks from my own house. A counselor of some sort insisted I must listen to and love the Replacements if I liked this album but at the time I didn't see the connection (which actually took a while). Still, it was apparently enough to let me spend the night in the wing of the dorm where the smart kids stayed, which eventually got me kicked out for miscegenation or whatever it was I was doing that was "wrong."

Tammy Cartwright: I was 14 and asked my mom to buy me this cassette for Christmas then driving up to my grandma's she says "hey let's listen to the tape I bought you." When the line "why can't I get just one fuck" hits she lost her shit. This was the only album she ever objected to. Punk rock no problem, R rated movies by all means but this record I thought was pretty tame caused a huge ruckus. I found it extra hilarious because growing up Prince was a road trip staple. "I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine."

Shelly Kurzynski Villasenor: I was 12 when this record came out and I remember seeing it in the window of B-side records on State Street in Madison and being attracted to the name of the band. I asked my dad, who was with me, who the "Violent Femmies" were. He laughed at me and for some reason didn't explain to me what a femme was. A few months later my dad's super cool younger co-worker gave 12-year-old-me an amazing mix tape that had a few songs from the album on it, which is when I became a fan and learned how to pronounce their name. I have that mix tape to this day (and need to digitize it before it stops working).

Derek Erdman: Sometimes, when I am sad, I listen to the song "Good Feeling" and just lay on my bed and cry. The guy who yelled at me from the sandwich shack is thinking right now: OH MAN, THAT GUY CRIES!

Jessica Oliver has seen the future of the internet, and it is good.

• #1 Show Of The Year!

• #1 Poster: signed copy Kidd Valley 2001 Burger Babe poster featuring Bethany Clement.

Have a good day, fellow caperers. Stay free & Stay kool.