Happy April, dear readership! I'm sure all of you are looking forward to the 20th of this month when we can all happily partake in the Devil's Lettuce! You know there's nothing ole Blazer loves more than tokin’ a doobie and listening to The Grateful Dead! Boy Howdy, if you know me, you know that describes my perfect weekend. Throw in a marathon of the Marvel movies, and you're describing my own heaven on Earth. Heaven being a place I totally believe in! It's totally real, just like ethical consumption under capitalism. Which—as we all know—is the best and really the only economic system that's ever had any success in Earth's history. It is also flat.

But enough truth and facts...we're here to talk about music! Specifically, the local music scene, and even more specifically, how to succeed in said local scene. After all, you definitely read this magazine for the most up-to-date journalism and criticism of Portland’s live music ecosystem. Also, what nudie mag column is complete without some well-researched life hacks to climb the ladder to financial success in the arts...

I knew the dame was trouble the moment I laid eyes on her. In my experience, most dames are trouble, but this one was in a league of her own—a femme fatale if ever I met one. She struck me as the type who would wait to poke holes in the condom until some poor bastard was wearing it.

The door to the club swung open, and in she stepped. A bolt of lightning lit up the sky outside, illuminating a silhouette of her slight but somehow still imposing frame. "Odd," I thought, "not a lot of lightning in Oregon. It's as though someone put it there on purpose to inject dramatic tension." Damn. I hate dramatic tension. I felt an ache creeping up from the pit of my stomach—the kind of ache you wind up with on the back end of a Taco Bell shame bender. I had a hunch I’d really be earning my paycheck tonight...

Google came throwing searchable data at humans at the same velocity as people were throwing searches for "funny cats" and "what is a hemorrhoid" into its search bar. The amount of knowledge in our hands is endless, but as the old saying goes, "We don't care. We just want to see funny cat memes."

I bet a lot of you don't know just how powerful Google really is, or how to properly search for things. To most, it's like looking at data in an Excel spreadsheet. You have little to no idea what you're looking at, and if you do know what you're looking at, you do not know how to change anything in it. Hence, this births a lot of interesting searches produced by people...

April Fools' Day...it's a storied tradition wherein anyone, from friends, lovers, roommates, or even giant corporations, all want to have a little fun and make a jest or pull a prank. Oddly enough, many people still get fooled by large-scale media reports of silly things, and take them as truth. Always check the date on those articles.

Where did April Fools' Day originate, and why? It has been speculated that it originated in older times, after the switch to the Gregorian calendar by order of Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and those still using the old calendar were referred to as April Fools, as they did not know it had changed. However, in Geoff Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, from 1392, he references, "Since March began thirty days and two," making it April 1st, a fox played a trick on a rooster...