Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below No. 100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”

Who named Tom Petty’s Other Band, also known as Tom Petty and Two of the Heartbreakers, also also known as “Mudcrutch?” Because that sounds like an off-brand Tool cover band. In any case, that band came before this band, the one that you’ve heard of, whose Greatest Hits and what appears to be a re-release of its 2000 Anthology sold a combined 12,321 copies last week.

This week’s list is a selection of one-week-ons: records that spent only the last week on the top 200, whether it was their first time on the list or not. Surprise! Marilyn Manson. Lest we forget, indeed. Also has anyone checked on Meatloaf? A recent USA Today headline said he was ‘recovering well’ but they also retweeted a Cormac McCarthy death rumor yesterday so…I dunno.

8. PETTY*TOM & THE HEARTBREAKERS ANTHOLOGY­: THROUGH THE YEARS 4,459 copies

22. SOUNDTRACK GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: AWESOME MIX VOL. 1 3,284 copies

46. VAN HALEN 1984 2,232 copies

69. (nice) JOHNSON*JACK IN BETWEEN DREAMS 1,896 copies

70. JOHN*ELTON GREATEST HITS 1,888 copies

72. MELLENCAMP*JOHN BEST THAT I COULD DO 1,877 copies

122. BENATAR*PAT GREATEST HITS 1,465 copies

123. MEATLOAF BAT OUT OF HELL 1,458 copies

182. MARILYN MANSON LEST WE FORGET: THE ­BEST OF 1,180 copies

(Previously.)

A new commercial for Raid® Ant & Roach Killer makes ‘masterpieces’ out of 20,000 dead roaches.

Imagine you were an artist and you were commissioned by a fancy advertising agency to make pop art out of dead bugs as a way to promote a deadly spray that kills roaches seven times faster than the next leading ant and roach spray and the agency guy is like, “You might say we’ve turned killing into an art,” and you have to keep a straight face as you tell your studio assistants that they’re going to be opening comically large petri dishes of dead but generally clean-looking, shiny roaches, and tweezing them into place on big canvas, using the bigger roaches for definition, and the smaller ones for the more detailed work, and that you will provide them pillows to rest their heads on as they lie in the prone position with their faces just inches away from said dead bugs, which were probably not killed by Raid® funnily enough because otherwise you’d all be huffing fumes in this enclosed space and that would be bad, but this is not that bad, because the bugs are just like any other medium—a tool for creative expression, and did we learn nothing from the elephant dung and Piss Christ?—so just be glad you have the easy, fun job, and not the job that is collecting and then humanely (?) gassing (?) and then counting out all the roaches so that you can use exactly twenty-thousand per canvas, since that number represents the high end of a roach infestation in the average house. Do you blink? No. You take the money and run!

(Comments are disabled for this video, thank goodness.)

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. And I think I should become a vegan. This is a good decision, right?” — Meatless Mary

That’s definitely a good idea. I admire vegetarians and vegans tremendously, even if I am not one. I have tried it in the past, and I would be a vegetarian or a vegan now. But I’m just too lazy. I don’t know what it is about vegetarians and vegans, I just find them very attractive. Possibly it is their haughty self-regard. Maybe they are not being poisoned by the vengeful bile of deceased animals. Possibly they are just hot. But chances are anyone I am attracted to already is or is thinking of being a vegetarian.

Quitting things, though, is insanely hard. I quit drinking for nine and a half years and it took some getting used to spending Friday nights punching a wall over and over again. Sometimes you can fool yourself into not missing the things you will be missing. If you only eat vegan cheese, the taste of real cheese will fade away from your memory. And be replaced by whatever they make vegan cheese out of. Which, if you pretend it is cheese, will replace what you think cheese tastes like in your memory. We can fool ourselves with all kinds of tricks. I set my alarm clock ahead fifteen minutes like four years ago and I still always think I am late, every damned morning, like some kind of complete moron. Running for the bus in a feverish sprint.

One warning though: you will probably still dream about bacon. I had sobriety dreams all the time where I was like “I should not be drinking this giant bottle of vodka behind this CVS in this dream!” And yet I wouldn’t stop, such is the nefarious nature of sobriety dreaming. You feel like you are flushing all this hard work down the toilet and there’s nothing you can do about it. Then, heaven forbid, you are drunk some night and you eat, like, a rack of ribs. You will feel so guilty about this! Your body was so pure and lithe with goodness and now it is once again poisoned with some kind of delicious barbecue sauce on top. But shame and guilt can be fun things to feel once in a while. Depending on who’s around.

In general, it is a really good idea to experiment with yourself. Drink only Mountain Dew for a month. Join a cult. Whatever you think you should do you should probably do. Just so you can experience it, figure out it’s not that big a deal and get over it. We get these ideas in our heads that if only we became a vegan or got a tattoo then everything else in our lives would fall into place. I have not experienced everything in my life falling into place. But I have experienced meatlessness and getting a tattoo. And I would recommend both of them to everybody. Mix it up! Life is pretty boring, you have to move the deck chairs on the Titanic around. It’s fun to feel like you can make decisions and choices and that life isn’t just spiritual prison in which nothing makes sense and everything you earn will be taken away from you. Try to enjoy your invisible cage.

“I feel so judged now on subways when I manspread. It’s not that I want to make other people uncomfortable, I just do not want to be uncomfortable myself. You know?” — Manspreading Manny

I hear you, Manny. I used to be a terrific manspreader myself. And I feel like we are going extinct. It never occurred to me that my manspreading was bothering anyone else. And usually I give up my seat on the subway practically as a default. Lady with a grocery bag? Giving up my seat. Little kid who’s probably going to fall and break his neck on the subway? Giving up my seat. I don’t even bother to sit down now unless it is like 4 a.m. and I’m the only one who’s on the train.

I am a man with some thighs. And I don’t have tons of junk, but I have enough that I don’t want to sit like an altar boy with my knees together. I’m a sloucher. Whenever I am home I am prone on my couchy thing. If I could get back and forth to the bathroom and refrigerator will lying down I think my weekends would be even more exciting. Could I rig up a hammock on wheels? I will report back when I have perfected this. Manspreading comes from the same impulse as mansplaining possibly. It’s not that I know everything, I just love hearing myself talk. And I like to feel like my opinion matters. Which is why I Iike to turn the volume up on my opinions as loudly as possible. My manspreading is about feeling like my junk matters and it need not be smashed together unless it is really important. Sadly, society has spoken, and both of these proud traditions are going the way of the Spotted Jackalope.

First, let’s blame the subway for not giving everyone enough room. And for not having enough subways. If I designed the subway we’d all be prone in long wonderful hammocks as we were whisked here and there and throughout the land. So don’t blame the manspreader, blame the seatmaker. I’d rather not sit next to anybody! I’d rather the pneumatic tube designs of Futurama would be implemented throughout the city. When are we getting pneumatic tubes? Maybe the seats on subways could have little molded leg holders, to show us how to sit. I am just giving up sitting entirely! Also when you sit next to people they generally are eating a vegan egg salad sandwich or applying eyeliner. People are terrible. Subways are awful and only getting more expensive! And my junk is squooshed. I hope everyone else is happy! Because I’m not! Life is unbearable and much too short.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.

Why does this keep happening?

There is an ancient Yiddish curse that, roughly translated, goes, “May you live to see bands you still think of as new, because they started up right after your most formative years as a listener to music, stick around long enough that suddenly they are putting out greatest hits collections in honor of their twentieth anniversary and, even though you can still remember where you were the moment you heard them, you are forced to confront the seemingly impossible amount of time that has expired since they first impinged on your consciousness and now the very thought of them is a painful reminder of how little you’ve done two decades on from when you were like, ‘Huh, these guys sound interesting, I should go to the record store and pick up their CD.’” They had very specific (and prescient) curses, the old Jews. Anyway, Air’s 20th’s anniversary collection is out now and they showed up on French TV to do a couple of songs, which I cannot embed for whatever reason but are available simply by clicking the words that are the names of their titles, i.e. “La femme d’argent” and “Kelly watch the stars.” Enjoy. I would say that I hope this doesn’t happen to you but when you get to be my age about all you’ve got left are dreams of revenge, so I am sorry to say that I kind of do hope it happens to you, young person. It goes quick. [Via]

★★ The four-year-old, looking for something to complain about, complained that the breeze was making him too cold, in the uniform-compliant polo shirt and shorts he was wearing for the next-to-last time. A school bus with a summer camp placard on it turned through the crosswalk, from the nearly empty street to the nearly empty avenue. The sun as it went higher was too hot on a black shirt. The smells on the air were foul and powerful—something fecal around an innocuous corner, something rank and fishy along a stretch of sidewalk where no fishmongering was even theoretically possible. Two women talked and smoked deep in the shadow of a doorway, off the sunstruck sidewalk. Humidity seeped in and the sun went away. Somehow, despite the dwindling light, a pair of sandals flashed brilliantly with each stride as their wearer jaywalked across Fifth Avenue.

14. Righteous Nihilist

13. Global Creative

12. BoBi (Bourgeois Bicoastal)

11. Early Bedtimer

10. Tasteful Tech Bro

9. Neo-Puritan

8. Cyber Hippie

7. Normcore Executive

6. Skateboard Dad

5. Athleisure Nomad

4. Masochist Minimalist

3. Exercise Person

2. Artisanal Prepper

1. WeWorker

Who is alien abduction insurance really for?

In Altamonte Springs, a sleepy suburb of Orlando, Florida, there’s a little insurance outfit, the Saint Lawrence Agency, that will sell you a bizarre product: “Alien Abduction Insurance.” For a low one-time premium of $9.95, company president Mike St. Lawrence offers $10 million in coverage for medical or psychiatric care and physical or emotional damages resulting from any future extraterrestrial kidnappings that take you past earth’s atmosphere and back. He even offers a double indemnity if your alien kidnappers leave you (man or woman) impregnated, insist on returning to molest you repeatedly, or refer to you as a potential food source. He doesn’t care if you’ve been abducted before; he’ll sell the same policy to anyone who inquires. There’s just one catch: if you want to make a claim on that coverage, you’ll need to prove that you were in fact abducted, ideally in the form of a signed statement by your abductors.

The Saint Lawrence Agency’s offering is patently absurd, written tongue-in-cheek and functionally impossible to claim. Yet now and then, someone genuinely afraid of abduction will find this insurance, only to discover that it’s poking fun at his or her fears. And St. Lawrence isn’t the only agent who’s ever offered alien abduction insurance; at least one other policy may have sucked true believers into the joke to their detriment. Parody policies like this one are an unsettling quandary about the ethics of business, humor, and our perception and treatment of people with “absurd” beliefs.

St. Lawrence wrote his abduction policy in 1987. He’d been selling $10 million “reincarnation insurance,” which he meant as a spoof on the decade’s yuppie materialism. If life insurance is about protecting your loved ones after you’re gone, he said, then “reincarnation insurance is all about insuring yourself when you come back for the next life,” if you can prove you’ve returned. Then one night he and his brother caught a TV interview with an abductee, Whitley Strieber, promoting his new book, Communion. His brother said he should make the emerging UFO mania of the era his next vehicle for satire. So he cracked out the policy in a fifteen-minute sitting.

St. Lawrence, who sees himself as a consumer advocate, described the policy as a spoof of the insurance industry, where many firms obfuscate details that could frustrate buyers and a select few straight up prey on fear and knowledge gaps to sell crap. “That’s the point I’m trying to make,” he said. “You’ve got to be careful as a consumer that someone’s not trying to pull the wool over your eyes.”

To make sure his product doesn’t become a massive irony, St. Lawrence takes pains to present his policy as a novelty item. His website, which looks like it was built on Angelfire circa 1996, is peppered with dated jokes, like the fact that he’s backed by the inventor of the Japanese junk bond, Dr. Hu F. Oh. He calls the gold-embossed certificate that comes with each purchase a unique gift, and makes a conscious effort not to sell to anyone he thinks doesn’t understand the joke. “Most of the people who purchase this policy don’t do it for themselves,” says St. Lawrence. “They do it for someone they know who might have an interest in the subject matter. It’s a really cool gift to get them if, and only if, they’ve got a sense of humor.”

But not everyone is so scrupulous. In 1996, Simon Burgess of London’s Goodfellow Rebecca Ingram Pearson (GRIP) put out his own alien abduction insurance. The exact timing is a little unclear, but St. Lawrence is convinced that it came out days after an article on his Alien Abduction Insurance Company ran in a British paper. “I get really bent out of shape when I talk about that Burgess guy,” he says. “I’d like to get my hands around his neck and… hurt him [laughs].” I reached out to Burgess at his most recent financial venture, British Money, but he did not respond to answer questions about the origins of his policy or anything else — including the status of these policies despite the fact that GRIP is no more. But Burgess does have a history with other parody insurance policies — against Loch Ness monster attacks and virgin births, to name a few — and his alien abduction policy did differ from St. Lawrence’s in some details, such as charging an approximately $150 yearly premium for an average of $1.5 million in coverage.

St. Lawrence got bent out of shape by the GRIP policy not just because it copied him, but also because he felt it led people to confuse him with a manipulative firm. In 1996, Burgess claimed he’d paid out $1.6 million to an abductee who came to him with a transparent alien claw, but later acknowledged this was a publicity stunt. A year later, it was reported that he’d insured the alien cult Heaven’s Gate for $1,000 with $1 million in coverage per person months before almost forty of them committed suicide in 1997. The company briefly stopped selling the policy, but had resumed sales by late 1998 at least after greed got the better of them, as Burgess told an SFGate reporter that year. By one account, GRIP wound up selling at least 30,000 policies and making at least £4 million. “I’ve never been afraid of parsing the feeble-minded from their cash,” Burgess said to the same SFGate reporter.

Most people who believe in alien abductions aren’t likely to buy into such prodding and impossible policies. However, according to Susan Clancy, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard and author of Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, stunts like Burgess’s can validate the fears of those most troubled by the prospect of abduction. There are always people too desperate for assistance to read the fine print who end up purchasing policies that will ultimately slap them in the face when they want to make a claim. Even policies like St. Lawrence’s, which is more obviously presented as a joke, can screw with this population, she said. “You think you’re going for help and you find that the person you’re going to for help is actually making fun of you?” muses Clancy. “It sucks.”

To date, St. Lawrence has sold about 100,000 policies. He claimed there was only one instance of a misunderstanding, when an old man bought a policy from him only to realize ten years later that it was all a joke. He says he did the honorable thing and refunded him $19.95 (the old rate for a policy). However it’s hard to say how many people may have been turned away or disappointed. It probably doesn’t help that he admits to having paid out on two policies, which drew a fair amount of publicity. At least one was to a true believer whom St. Lawrence says still had a sense of humor and used the publicity to make light of a real fear. The man eventually presented him with a letter from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor claiming that an object he’d removed form his body after an abduction wasn’t made of any earthly metal, a proof St. Lawrence accepted. He then agreed to pay out $10 million — in the form of $1 per year over 10 million years or until the man died. However, he lost track of him down the line.

Within business ethics, it’s functionally legitimate to insure almost anyone against almost anything. For fun and publicity, cruise lines have taken out policies against sea monster attacks and hotels against damage caused by their poltergeists. St. Lawrence has even been investigated by regulators in Texas and Florida. They affirmed that, so long as he’s clear about the humorous intent of the impossibility of a full payout on the scheme, what he’s doing is absolutely permissible — officially ethical.

Even Clancy admitted the number of people who could possibly be burned by these (and most other) parody policies is very low, especially in relation to those who’ll benefit from the satire. She estimated that while up to ten percent of Americans believe alien abductions are possible, only one percent believe they happen, and just a small subset of those people live in actual perpetual fear that might drive them to seek legitimate insurance. For any product, there’s always acceptable risk, she stressed. “But in the field of psychology and psychiatry,” she said, “we’re very worried about the issue of harm. So even if it harmed only one person for every thousand who got a [laugh] out of it, I’d still have ethical concerns.”

St. Lawrence stands by the humor, value, and legitimacy of what he’s doing. He also fulfills his legitimate duties as the purveyor of a novelty product. But sometimes existing ethical norms and regulations fall short of a full understanding of the effect a product can have on a population — especially a tiny population we’re used to freely mocking.

It’s impossible to create a regulatory system that fully mitigates harm to consumers, at least without becoming unduly censorious. Still, one has to wonder whether Burgess would have joked so freely about bilking the “feeble-minded” and marketed his policies so legally-yet-cavalierly if he’d actually known an abductee as a person rather than a joke. Or whether St. Lawrence should have made a greater effort to track down the folks he’s paid out to in order to understand the long-term effects of his products. There’s human value in contemplating absurd insurance policies beyond the initial laugh factor. But for most people, all of this is a little too far out there to give a flying fuck about. And so it flies.

Good morning, ocean.

You know those times when you think it’s actually a day later than it really is and when you find out you’re all depressed because now you’ve got what feels like an “extra” day of your horrible life to go through? I think the worst one of those is when you think it’s Wednesday but it’s really Tuesday, both because a) that is the earliest in the week it can ever happen and b) it means your Monday was so long it felt like two fucking days. Guess what day I thought it was when I woke up this morning?

Anyway, here is a collaboration between Awl favorite Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and ambient pioneer Suzanne Ciani. No matter what mood you woke up in, and no matter how terrible the rest of your day(s) will be, this should set you right, at least for a little while. It is all “slow, pulsing forms and sinuous, melodic sequences that conjure both an oceanic world and the unlimited sound made possible by modular processing,” but not in a [“jerking off” motion] way. Enjoy.

★★★ The heat was not as forbidding as the glare in the sky made it seem. The sidewalk was underpopulated but getting iced coffee meant cutting through a throng. Little things had baked dry or withered on the sidewalk: bird droppings, fruit scraps, parts of a dead bird. An old gutter puddle, having settled into clarity, was now beginning to cloud up with stagnant growth. The child who hadn’t wanted to go out now wanted to stay out, and the child who’d been willing to go was unwilling to stay.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s ‘Pond’ is one of the best things I’ve read this year, and that includes real books where people aren’t making up stories.

I am not a huge proponent of fiction, so when something comes along in that category that really grabs me I get a little evangelical about it. What I’m saying is I really want to recommend to you Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, which is out on July 12.

It’s always a difficult line to walk when you urge a book on someone but do not want to reveal too much about it, so let me just share some of the promotional copy:

A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience … rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood.

I won’t add much, because you should really come to it fresh, except to tell you that the book is a phenomenal combination of hilarity and stillness with a weird undercurrent of menace that never quite rises to the surface but always leaves you slightly uneasy even as you are smiling about something brilliant the writer has managed to capture in the short space of a few pages. (Samuel Beckett is the presiding spirit here, but if you are not a fan do not be frightened off; it is an influence that is borne lightly and wielded well.)

At around 200 pages the book is indeed “deceptively slender.” It’s not a beach book per se, but it is perfect for now because you can read it in a night or dip into it as time allows; the brevity of the chapters give you the space to take as much as you want depending on your mood. The narrative voice is unusual in our present moment because you are never filled with rage or impatience by it, and the level of self-importance the book attaches to itself is so low that you are never even once tempted to make the “jerking off” motion that seems to be the only reasonable response to most of the novels being published today.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it. I mean, I guess do take my word for it but pick it up and then judge for yourself. If you order it now you will have it in a couple of weeks and then at least your what to read problem will be solved. Enjoy.