Reasonable Facsimile

Yes, I have realized my lifelong dream: warbling into a microphone and fooling a computer into believing that I can sing.

Rock Band is quite possibly the best game ever.

I will leave the drumming and guitar playing to my cohorts Full Metal Ted and Ixtililton, however -- I have no time for those aspects of the game that actually require "rhythm" or "skill."

No, instead I will use my sort of half-assed mynah bird-like ability to mimic sounds, which seems to be enough to fool Rock Band quite handily at easy and medium difficulty. This is because the game does not notice whether you actually know the words, or can even read them off of the screen. No, all you need to do is match the pitch and timing.

You could be singing in Japanese, as long as you were hitting something approximating the right notes at the right time. It even shows you what pitch you're actually singing at, relative to what you should be hitting, so you can find your note.

That is why, contrary to all logic, the hardest songs to do well on, vocals-wise, are the punk songs and the irritatingly-syncopated Aerosmith song "Train Kept A-Rollin'."

(Speaking of Aerosmith: how is it possible that this man was left off of this list? I mean, seriously.)

So, anyway, our "band," "Reasonable Facsimile," isn't exactly sweeping Rock Band off its feet (ace drumming by FMTed notwithstanding), but we have managed to score a tour bus and win a band challenge against an "evil" rock band --- a victory right out of a cheap Hollywood version of Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas (which is an obscure Jim Henson holiday classic, notable mainly for the fact that the down-homey good guys lose to the scuzzy heavy metal stylings of the Riverbottom Nightmare Band).

We specialize in songs that aren't particularly challenging, amped up to "medium" difficulty when we're feeling daring. Our manager tells us that if we want to be World Tour material or get our own private jet, we're going to need to expand our repertoire beyond Nirvana's "In Bloom" and Weezer's "Buddy Holly," but, dammit, we have to play to our fanbase.

Plus "Blitzkrieg Bop" is really, really hard to sing, for some reason.