The Dating Profile of a Fedora

My self-summary: 

First things first: I "hat" filling these things out. Haha.

So basically I am an ambitious and caring "chap"(eau) who is looking for that special cranium. I haven't had a lot of success with eBay or Etsy so I'm giving this site a shot. A few things you should know about me:

1) I am not into "drama". I want someone who is more inclined to film noir or vaudeville.

2) I'm sick of girls who like snap-backs and Obey caps and all that beanie garbage. I am into classy girls only so if you've ever even tried those other ones on once I'm not interested.

3) Nobody fake please. I am into real people, I've dealt with enough mannikins in my day.

What I'm doing with my life:

I currently work in "dust management "on the top shelf of a trendy vintage clothing store. I am not some trashy pin-stripe rapist hat you find off the rack at Le Chateau - I'm the real, Italian-made deal. I once belonged to Bumbles Baconbit, an old time Jazz tubist. He got shot by shark (or a piranha? It was some carnivorous fish) who picked me up, and gave me to his number one prize fighter Marvin "The Big Thumb" Moscovitch. Marvin took up Buddhism in his old age and renounced all of his world possessions to the Goodwill. That's when I started drifting through Sally Annes, the Value Villages, the pawns...

I've seen a lot...

I'm really good at:

Making awkward, conscientious males into Casanova sex gods, by myself, without the need for a new wardrobe, exercise, or deodorant.

Favourite books, movies, shows, music and food:

My favourite book is Dashiell Hammet's The Maltese Falcon. I'm also big into Chuck Palahniuk, Machiavelli and Ayn Rand.

As for movies, I like so many but a few of my favourites are Vertigo, The Sting, and all Indiana Jones's (except that last one).

For music, I generally prefer sicilian folk tunes, death metal, and big band swing jazz but I have been known to listen to Pac and Biggie on occasion.

The six things I could never do without:

Leather trench-coats
Metallic blue vests
Male puberty
Running shoes
Metallic blue ties
Jezebel

I spend a lot of time thinking about:

JFK's hat-less electoral campaign and its disastrous effects on headware.

On a typical Friday night I am:

Out with Moxy Joe and Big Phillip at the speak easy downin' moonshine and gettin' ossified, ya dig?

The most private thing I am willing to admit:

I'm not racist but sometimes I think snap-backs are a little bit "simple".

I am looking for:

Girls that love class
Ages 18-87
Near "The Big Apple"
For new friends, long-term dating, short term sweating, flaneurs, drive-bys, break-dancing, and pool sharks

Message me if:

You aren't just looking for something to pull raffle tickets from or to put on your French bulldog.

Craft Beer, or, The Tale of a Tub

I often like to say that beer is more than just a drink. It's a drink with alcohol. It's more than just a drink with alcohol, though; it's a way of life. Alcoholism, I supposed you'd call it. The art and science of crafting a good brew takes more than just the right equipment, the skills, the years of experimentation and the necessary latent depressive family issues. It takes vision. What kind of vision? Blurry, colourful, and shimmering gold. With bubbles. Think I'm joking? Just ask a master craftsman like myself. 

"Hey Master C, what makes a great beer?"

"The genesis of a great beer takes blood, sweat, tears, some hops, barley, and if you've got any water that helps a little too. Flavour is kind of a big deal. Fermenting starts with the heart. It ends with the kidneys. In between, there are a lot of different byways. Aim for the good bits."

-Me

The following brews have made my list  of "Best Overall Beer I Drank in the Last 6 Hours". Give them a try, I promise they will offer you a world of beer.

-Master Craftsbrewman Hortense McBreakfast

2nd Amendment Sold on Pride 1776: Beyond just a local beer, beyond just a microbrew, 2nd Amendment is what is known as a "conspiro-brew", that is, brewed by a furtive cadre of forest brethren who have sworn to keep its secret to their twig-riddled deathbeds. It is so exclusive that the recipe is known in its entirety to only one single man and three goats. As for the taste, it's gamey, tough, and full of local pride and goat feed.

Shorinji Egg Beer: Some say it is impossible to make beer out of eggs. Luckily, the Japanese have always had a far keener understanding of the matter at hand, namely, that "impossibility" is NOT the same thing as just "really, really gross". It has long been known that the Japanese have more than our 5 traditional flavours. This beer is brewed to titillate the 9th flavour, GANGURO, the taste of pickled sea-urchins and pocky. This beer is salty, yolky, and a surprisingly smooth breakfast sausage condiment.

BUMP: The party beer par excellence. BUMP is smooth, crisp, medicinal, and has an excellent bouquet when sniffed in a red plastic cup or spurted out of a hose onto white t-shirts. Get your party bumpin' with the party beer called BUMP.

Napoleon Brandy Beer: A crisp, fritter-like yeast beer that models itself on a brandy stew served to Marshal Ney the night before the Battle of Waterloo. Traditional ingredients are attempted and their flavours coaxed out by means of a long gargling process practiced by Napoleon's Hussars and their horses. The yeast in this case is the least of your concerns.

Gangrene Faggot Nigger Ale: You've heard the phrase "don't judge a book by it's cover?" The trend these days seems to be to give a slightly ironic name to well-crafted drinks, such as "Sibling Rivalry", "Fat Bastard", "Hobgoblin" etc. This particular ale outdoes them all with a hint of the old south and just the slightest dash of septicemia.

Beer Ball Putsch Special '22: Brewed in accordance with German purity laws, this beer contains only hops, barley, and a traceable family tree with no discernible Semitic miscegenation.

Victoria's: A mild beer mixed with fruit juice for the girly girl in your life. Guaranteed to taste like unicorn saliva. Victoria's comes in a juice-box + promotional bendy straw.

Barnaby 128: This "value-priced" lager (sold at its name sake for a buck twenty-eight) comes from nowhere, goes nowhere, and lives in the lowest depths of the 2x4 grotto. The preferred beer of the homeless guy who sits outside of the beer store, this beer will give you so much value you'll wonder how they ever crammed it in a bottle.

Sports Beer: Trying to avoid paying high premiums on brand name beers, many sporting facilities have taken up with the "Sports Beer" movement, a loose conglomerate of anonymous beer manufacturers who sell cheap and brew cheaper. Despite the low quality of the ingredients, the taste, the bottle materials and the question of zamboni-related contaminants, Sports Beer offers a surprising effect when emptied into a bathtub or sipped through the horn of a Vuvuzela.

Offenboschsauerbenuzfgght: The ancient monastery of Offenboschsauerbenuzfgght, located in the Offenboschsauerbenuzfgght valley beneath the Tuchushoffenboschsauerbenuzfgght mountain range of Boschsauer-On-The-Booger is famed the world over for its traditional "Tuchus Beer". The beer is hand-brewed by a special sect of Trappist Monks who have all taken a vow of incontinence.

Andy Warhol's Glasses: This beer is clearly designed to swoop up the market from Pabst Blue Ribbon. If you've long enjoyed PBR and are looking to sip something a little different as you drive your big wheelie down the park with a copy of The Marriage Plot in hand and a single birkenstock dangling from your neon coloured toenails, this is brew for you.

The End of Dogs

Earlier this year, cats became the preferred pet in North American households for the first time in History. Most office and bookstore pets are cats too. For every dog that gets a scratch behind the ear, three cats will get the same. For years, feline progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to cats? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences.

"I'm game if you are" the little goomba seemed to say.

In his final book, The Tennis Ball, published in 2007, the sociologist Monsieur Grumbles describes the changing pet dynamics of Ouaf, the region in southwestern France where he grew up. The hunting dogs once held the privileges of patrimonial loyalty and filial inheritance in Ouaf. But over the decades, changing economic forces turned those privileges into curses. Although the land no longer produced the impressive hunting game once had, the dogs felt obligated to hunt it. Meanwhile, modern cats shunned farm life, lured away by mice and adventure in the city. They occasionally returned for the traditional "flinging of the tennis balls", but the dogs who awaited them had lost their prestige. This is the image that keeps recurring to me, one that Grumbles describes in his book: at the tennis ball, the dogs, self-conscious about their diminished status, sit stiffly, their paws by their sides, as the cats twirl away at balls of thread.

Parallel distraction - a problem common enough in today's digital society. Is it over here? Is it over there? The question - pertinent! Does this painting represent the disintegration of the self back into the animistic conception of multiple spirits? Does it foreshadow the rhizomatic de-structuring of our species into parallax courses of cybernetic technology and computerization? Or a cat? Probably a cat.

Dogs dominate just two of the 15 pet categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: purse-pet and training reality tv-show pet. Cats have everything else—cute pet, YouTube pet, internet meme, pet in novels. Many of the new categories  “replace the things that cats used to do on the streets for free.” None is especially high-paying in snacks. But the steady accumulation of these pet-jobs adds up to an economy that, for working pets, has become more amenable to cats than to dogs.

Muslim Integration.

Near the top of the pets pyramid, of course, the upward march of cats stalls. Prominent cat celebrities, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities, and most of us can tick off their names just from occasionally reading the business pages: Maru, icanhascheeseburger, OMGcat etc. Only 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have cats, and the number has never risen much above that.

"I know all there is to know of conflict and killing. I know how to swing my paws to left and right, and how to use my teeth sturdily in a fight. I know how to dash among the charging chariots drawn by the swiftest mares, and I know how to tread the measure of angry Ares in close encounter. Yet I’d not strike secretly at a goose like you, but openly, and hope to hit you."

Over the years, researchers have sometimes exaggerated these differences and described the particular talents of cats in crude pet stereotypes: cats as less empathetic, as worse consensus-seekers and better thinkers; cats as bringing a questionable moral sensibility to bear on a cutthroat business world. In the ’90s, this field of cat-ist theory seemed to be forcing the point. But after the latest financial crisis, these ideas have more resonance. Researchers have started looking into the relationship between caninity and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of dogs, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions. The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional pet map: dogs on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and cats on the side of the cool and levelheaded.

Misse/Luttine! Masculine/Feminine! Black/ White!  L'Allegro / Il Pensoro! Woof / Ouaf!

IF YOU REALLY want to see where the world is headed, of course, looking at the current pet workforce can get you only so far. demographically, we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by cat owners. The Country Hunting Hound, meanwhile, master of wild beast and wild country, seems too far-fetched and preposterous even for celebrity gossip. His modern equivalents are the stunted dogs in Paris Hilton's purse.

American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega dog, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This often-unemployed, intellectually challenged loser can show up as a perpetual goofball,  or a happy couch potato. He can be sweet, bitter, nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a DOG. The American Hounddog novelist has lost his mojo and entirely given up on hunting as a way for his characters to assert canine dominance. The current play style is more childlike; innocence is more fashionable than the chase, the cuddle preferable to the kill.

"This is the eternal goofiness of things" a wise poet once said.  Even in the midst of our highest attentiveness, our hunting posture is, I'm afraid, hilarious. Not that you aren't doing a good job, my doughty hound Pascal. You are completely on the right track. The creature is right there. But to us, I'm afraid, your bug-eyed concern and sausage tail, your splayed posture and patchy demeanour are only too silly.

The Tenochitlan Times

Sir Basel Paprika strikes again, putting the "con" in "unsolicited contributions". But this blogmaster has nothing but praise for this latest piece of archaeo-journalism.

Breaking History News!

Archaeologists have recently uncovered a letter written to the Tenochitlan Times, an early Mayan newspaper, dated from approximately 700 CE. It appears to concern the traditional Mesoamerican ball game, which until now has remained unnamed. The piece, much of which is unfortunately lost to erosion and spittle, was found on what appears to be the Op-Ed section of the paper, and truly shows how much we have evolved as a species. The discoverers are very excited about the find, and as of publication appear to have knocked off early for a couple of pints. 

The article, as it was found and translated, is printed below in its entirety. 

Dear Sir, 

I would like to complain in the strongest possible terms about the article in last week’s Times concerning the changes King Eighteen Rabbits has made to our noble sport of Traditional Mesoamerican Ball Game. In said article you made clear your stance that cutting out the heart of the captain of the winning team was the way of the past, and cutting out the heart of the captain of the losing team, as dictated by King Eighteen Rabbits, was the superior practice. Now, while I certainly don’t disagree that appeasing the wrath of Quetzalcoatl with the death of the defeated captain is the current vogue, it is not a fashion that I believe suits the noble traditions of Traditional Mesoamerican Ball Game. In any case, what right does our hereditary King have in changing the rules of our hereditary game? All I can say is, I know I didn’t vote for him. 

And what has happened to our youth that they would accept such a change, and indeed celebrate it? Back in my day, it was considered a great honour to have your still-beating heart wrenched from your chest to the applause of the nation and watch helplessly as it was set on fire moments before you were beheaded. Men trained their entire lives to be able to have that single moment of joy in knowing that their disembodied head would soon be tumbling down the 365 steps of the temple. What kids today seem to lack is a proper notion of hard work and sacrifice. We’re being too soft on our kids, teaching them that only the losers should be killed rather than the truth that made our society great – that the winners get to be killed. 

And now they’re letting women play too? Now, I’m not a sexist – some of my best friends are women! So I’m the first to admit that a woman can be sacrificed to a violent god of fire as well as any man, but we can’t simply throw out our traditions. What’s best for society and for our families is that our wives, mothers, and daughters stay in their traditional societal place at the top of active volcanoes and leave the ritualized proxy for warfare to the men. This is just another example of the feminization of men in this increasingly politically correct nation. Once we make it “wrong” to keep women from sacrificing their lives in a brutal blood-sport, what else will the reverse sexist feminazis [Translation here is loose (ed.)] do to make the world more difficult for men? Start doing the disemboweling themselves? Not on my watch. 

In fact, when I was a boy, [Fragment lost – 2 pages] and then the salamander got into the ratchet hole –RIGHT NEXT TO THE PIG!

As a Born-Again Quetzacoatlian, I see it as an offense to Our Lord along the highest order that his ceremonies are mocked in this way, with the sacrifice consisting only of the second best player’s heart. And I certainly don’t think that that’s a practice that should be seen broadcast on Public Temple Programming!!!!! Think of the children, many of whom go to the temple hoping to see a harmless, family-friendly, traditional dismemberment, and wind up viewing the perverted practice of the slaughter of the losing captain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is there no place for decency left in our society!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! [Fragment lost – several paragraphs in length] !?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Also, chocolate is getting sweeter and rubber is getting softer, and someone should do something about that. Maybe those new Spaniards can help – they seem to know what’s what! No newfangled notions of not-killing-people-in-brutal-ways for them, no sir!

Sincerely, 
Sargent-Major (Ret.) Xablanque Zipanca

Dr. Spring Breaker vs The Revolution

The world is on the brink of destruction, as per usual. It's Easter Saturday 9:40 p.m. a.d. 2013 and the holy ghost isn't due for a good little while. I see no reason why I shouldn't go see a film about the scantily.

Draped over a divan of cinema chairs, jackets, and pre-packed contraband cookies and coke, I took it upon myself to sit back and chew the millennial cud. Harmony Korin's latest, Spring Breakers, Scarface for the Hello Kitty generation, was about to start its cheerful jaunt down the beachwalks of depravity, and my critical faculty was set to slowcooker poignant. 

THE PREVIEWS

As I said, the world was on the brink of destruction, as per usual. I did not need Rob Stewart to remind me, with all the eloquence of a beached lawnmower, that I needed to begin "engaging with different governments, engaging with different corporations". The 8th graders sitting behind who snuck in to the movie might have sympathized with his "pothead high schooler reading Hamlet aloud in class" delivery of what may very well have been a new Declaration of the Rights of Mermaids...I remained, beyond passive, annoyed. If he was going to start me thinking seriously about evolution (insert big red "R" before previous word in 2 seconds), he could have at least had the decency to be ugly.

Does it not seem that we are getting a little lazy in our Jeremiads?  I am not saying it isn't appropriate to address the question of inevitable human destruction in the cinema. Far from it. I am more concerned with what I detect to be an odious optimism in the film's preview. I posit that there are certain epic conventions that come with attempting to agitate by means of propaganda. These conventions are as sacred as the Three Unities, and ought never to be tampered with. They include:

• Shrill organ music
• Intertitles with nonsensical French slogans
• Sweaty Arabic politicians listing off complaints on their fingers
• V for Vendetta masks
• Cheeky animated depictions of the "oil situation"
• Bearded eastern European professors who harangue with poop jokes
• Black and white only
• An utter pessimism tempered only with off-colour innuendo

Well, I was in such a tizzy, that it took a whole half hour into Spring Breakers to realize most of my grievances were dissipating through the varieties of religious experiences jiggling before my eyes, and the transcendental empiricism of James Franco's marvelous dental situation.

I got … I got SHORTS! Every fuckin' color.

"Well now," I said to myself, "This is how the world should end. Not with a whimper, but with a bang bang bang bang pew pew bang slap stab bang!"

Perhaps some of the optimists among you disagree. Perhaps you really are motivated by films that do well "in Vancouver", that depict a chance for the human race beyond the "artisan grilled-cheese sandwiches until cannibalism" esprit du temps. 

I'm not asking you how you'd like your planet. I'm asking you how you like your movies. Remember when the world was going to end in the 60's?

Bitch Don't Kill My Vibrant Academic Atmopshere

It seems that students at Ottawa's Raven University are up in arms again, this time against Rap all-star Rick Ro$ado. The controversy is focused on some lines in his upcoming lecture entitled "HNIC" (an unidentified acronym). Professor Ro$ado apparently quotes a rapacious verse, here transliterated for the common reader into normalized English:

"Putting various potables into her beverage, of which she is none the wiser. I then proceeded to enjoy her in flagrante delicto, with her none the wiser, ho ho."

But Raven students are having none of it. A petition has gone up to keep the controversial academic from giving his sold-out lecture on campus.

"We can't stand by and let this sort of sexist smut be promulgated on a University campus" says Christine McSneeze, a 3rd year student writing her thesis on her two favourite works, Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Marquis de Sade's Justine.

"It's outrageous the things he says about women. Guns, violence, rape...Who says we can talk about these things just like that? The money and time spent on this show could be used for something beautiful, like a production of Titus Andronicus, or a bust of my favourite philosopher, Friedrich NietzCHA."

 Ranked by MacLeod's Magazine as "Canada's Most Outraged University", Raven has a long history of protest. This sense of left-wing working class resistance stretches back to its earliest days as "Raven College", founded in 1942 as a training school for canine veterans of the second world war. Since then, the school's bark has been consistently and progressively growing in relation to its bite. In the last decade, students from Raven have led campaigns against:

-Abortions on Campus
-Anti-Abortions on Campus
-Israeli Abortions on and off Campus
-Cystic Fibrosis or "The White Man's Disease"
-Gaybortionism on Campus
-Student Fees
-Cystic Feebortionism
-Anti-Student Association Non-Fees
-The Collected Works of Catullus, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other major rapists of the canon

Yet it seems like all the public scrutiny has mollified the heart of Ro$ado, gentle giant, to the fairer sex. Upon learning that his music would be pulled from ethically conscious radio stations across North America, Ro$edes spoke a sincere speech later forwarded as an email attachment to the world (again, sanitized into standard English):

"Who doubts my appreciation for the fairer sex? There was misapprehension in your interpretations. I would never utter the phrase "non-consensual" in my work. The community will not abide it. Hip hop will not abide it. I just want to address all the females on my social networking platforms... I brook it not!"

Water Margin Clan

LIANG SHAN CLAN PUTTING FAR EAST COAST RAP BACK ON THE MAP

Album: Enter the Marshland
Single: "Protect ya Son of Heaven"
Heavenly King Records
Mid-13th Century





Say what you will about how the Song Dynasty rap industry is dominated by Shaolin, Tibetan Lama, Upanishadic, and any of those other West Coast groups - pure, hardcore Far Eastern rap is on the rise again, and no group better represents this than the 108 members of the Liang Shan Clan.

Since the mid-Tang dynasty, rap has been dominated by Buddhist themes and styles focusing on the impermanence of existence and incorporating foreign Sanskrit slang, known on the streets as "Dharma Rap" and "OM Steez" due to the prevalence of the popular Indian word.

With roots going all the way back to the Three Kingdom stylings of Guan Yu and Cao Cao, Liang Shan represents a resurgence in the hardcore eastern banditry style of rapping. Their lyrics are sharp as the various traditional Chinese weapons they wield - Tiger fork, Guan Dao, Horsecutter - but when it comes to throwin down with the mic, Liang Shan cut through diamonds.

"We killin' tigers and shootin' arrows up in dis bitch!" screams Li Kui AKA the Black Whirlwind, the Clan's most wild and exuberant representative.

"We got 72 Earthly Fiends and 36 Heaven Spirits, making up 108 members of the Clan" says the more estoric Wu Yong AKA WZA, whose mythology for the clan stems from various eclectic gang and prison religions (I Ching, White Lotus, Yellow Turbans etc). Although the clan certainly incorporates Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist themes - one of its most popular members is Lu Zhishen the drunken monk - the core of the lyrics focus on the street-style martial arts upbringing of the clan members.

"These guys came from nothing. Criminals, gang members, southern Chinese Taoists - the Liang guys came from nowhere. Now they puttin' the Marsh on the map, see?"

The clan's dark, dirty street inspired production come from DJ Song Jiang AKA Timley Rain aka the TZA, who formed the clan with now deceased member Chao Gai. The sampling and production on their first album, "Enter the Marshland", is unprecedented for the cheapness of the gongs, drums, erhu and flutes used in recording sessions - most of which took place in Song Jiang's basement tea-room.

"Their music always sounds so raw - like you drinkin in a nasty old inn at the side of the road and the crickets be chirpin and the timber be fallin off the roof and shit... Starts rainin, two merchants playin go, wiv some old dude playin on some out o' tune guqin - some rugged ass provincial shit, y'know?"

The Clan origins, according to Song Jiang, are shrouded in the warrior past of all the members: "we had all these bandits and warrior types, and they was fightin and killin and trying to make it big with they lyrics. And they all started  running from the Imperial Guard and shit, and gathering down at my place in this shitty swampy ass area, a place called Mount Liang. And I thought, we need a clan, you know, a real deep clique...They done shit like that up in Shaolin, it's working for the Buddhists, why not us?"


The Clan's violent style is rooted in the traditional Confucian doctrine of saving the Emperor (whom the clan totally respect) from the corrupt advisors around him. But the Clan is all about hip-hop innovation. Previous to the Liang, rap shows typically consisted of only one or two MC's on stage plus DJ. Liang Shan Clan broke new ground by having all 108 members on stage - and the audiences loved it.

"You couldn't beat the energy of those guys" says local tea-shop owner Big Belly Wong. "You just had these chiggas, a hundred or so of em, and they was all just givin' and givin', ya know? You'd have Wu-Song just killing it with a tiger-slaying verse, right, like:

Three bowls don't cross bridge but I throw em back huh
Drunk as fuck tiger style tiger bitch on my back huh
Ain't no tiger it's a pussy im'a crack huh
Pass the bowl, pass the bowl or i'ma attack bruh

And while he doin that right, you got all the other members throwin' up and yelling "LIANG SHAN CLAN! LIANG SHAN CLAN!" and of course you got Black Whirlwind drunk and high as fuck strippin down naked to his chigga ass and just throwin hisself and his two axes all over the fucking place. And then you know you got Song Jiang on the beats, he razor sharp, but then it all cuts out see, and we all hold up our torches and fireworks and shit and pour out a pot of rice wine for CHAO GAI.

RIP CHAO GAI! LIANG SHAN CLAN FOREVER MOTHERFUCKERS!"

The Clan obviously inspires devotion among its fanbase, who insist on purchasing Liang Shan Brand clothes, tea sets, wine gourds, weapons, go boards, even Chinese head rags. And of course, the tattoo designs found on the sleeves and body of "Nine Dragons Shi Jin" are inspiring tons of copycats. Before Shi  Jin, tattoos were considered a sign of a criminal or gang-related past - now it's a pure Hip-Hop fashion statement.


"Don't know what all the fuss be," says Nine Dragons, "I jus' wanted some dragons and shit on ma body. Dragons be mean as fuck. Ain't nobody fuckin wit dem mothafuckers, ya know?"

But perhaps the most inspiring part of the Clan's story are the solo careers. Song Jiang, who conceived of the clan as an act in itself, also planned for the individual members to sign-off on different labels for totally solo adventures. As such, the Clan plans to completely infiltrate the hip hop industry of the Middle Kingdom.

Key members of the Liangshan Clan with big solo albums include:

• Wu Song AKA Tiger Killah, whose album "Tiga Style" is rugged and raw
• Panther Headed Lin Chong, solo album "Only Built for Three-Sectional Staff"
• Lu Da AKA Sagacious Lu the Tattooed Monk, solo album "Iron Enlightened Man"
• Li Kui AKA The Black Whirlwind, solo album "Enter the Marshland Dirty Version: Return to Mount Liang"

And with many more coming from Wu Yong AKA the WZA, the Three Brothers Ruan, and Sun Er Niang AKA The Witch. The Clan are planning a big "Enter the Marshland" album tour of the Middle Kingdom some time in the late Song dynasty.