Here I am, about to start a new company.  And my hope is that it becomes successful, brandwise and financially.  So, I believe it's important to reach back into the past and revisit the utter failure my first company was and still remains to be.  When I started Up to Zero Records, I had no idea what I was doing.  I just wanted to be involved in the underground music scene.  Armed with a list of suggestions from Mike Park of Asian Man Records, I felt my way along to failure and financial ruin.  It's been six years since I spent any money on the label but I still have a mountain of debt to call my own.  The music industry is fickle, so there are a million reasons for a record label to fail.  But I could have set myself up for success and probably not have incurred so much debt.  So, let's look at how to not run a record label, or any business for that matter.

I came up with this recipe out of nowhere.  I sort of knew how to make Shrimp Scampi but I'm not a huge seafood fan.  I can handle shrimp every once in awhile, but it's not an every week thing for me.  My wife loves garlic, thus she loves Shrimp Scampi.  At the time of this recipe's creation, we were just dating and I wanted to impress her and still enjoy the meal.  So, I came up with this.  Basically, I ripped out the shrimp and added chicken breast.  Then I added bacon because, well, bacon makes everything better.  The recipe has changed a lot over the years, but it's still her favorite, even when I screw it up.

When most people really get into hot sauce, odds are they have only been using one sauce their whole lives.  Maybe they grew up in the South and only got a taste of Crystal.  Perhaps their parents were from Mexico, so they had a bottle of Valentina in the cupboard.  Or maybe their parents didn't like hot sauce, so they've only tried Tobasco, easily available everywhere.  Then they tried something new.  Maybe it was hotter or maybe it had better flavor, but it was better and they became inspired to try even more sauces.  Thus begins the journey for most Chile Heads.  And every Chile Head has their favorite that they will try and convince you is better than your stand by.  I've seen a ton of articles and blogs on the web attempt to rank the best hot sauces out there.  Truth be told, hot sauce is just like beer and wine, in that, no one sauce is best for everything.  Different types of hot sauces pair better with different types of foods.  Variety is the spice of life and this is no truer than with hot sauce.

So, consider this your awesome hot sauce users guide.  To qualify this list, I will tell you that I am a Chile Head who not only goes after heat, but after flavor.  At one point in my life, I had no less than 30 hot sauces in my fridge.  That's paired down a bit in the past few years.  This list only includes sauces I like to use regularly and with food that I want to taste, sorry, no seafood.  There are no boutique sauces on here and no variant sauces, such as Cholula Garlic(although, yum!).  There are no extremely hot sauces because this is about pairing a hot sauce with a food to enhance it's flavor(and give it a kick of course).

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When I first heard that Matt Skiba was going to replace Tom DeLonge in blink-182, I had several reactions.  First, what about Alkaline Trio?  I love that band.  Second, okay, whatever.  blink hasn't been all that exciting these last few years.  I didn't even buy their last album and the whole drama scenario that Tom brought to the band sort of ruined what had been one of the biggest bands to influence me as a musician.  I used to love blink but they really had become a let down in every facet of a band worth following.  Lastly, what the Hell is this going to sound like?  How is the King of morbid Chicago pop punk going to sound in the band that brought the light hearted, fun pop punk of Southern California?  The scenes and styles couldn't be much more different.  This made no sense to me.

Until I thought about it.

Bizarro was a villain from the DC Comics universe.  He was basically Superman with an evil twist.  He came from Bizarro world.  This whole Bizarro version of Superman was later expanded into pop culture by the T.V. show, "Seinfeld".  Jerry Seinfeld is a big Superman fan, so it's no wonder this became a running joke on the show, as characters would run into the Bizarro versions of each other throughout the seasons.  The idea was picked up by "How I Met Your Mother", as the characters would run into the 'doppelganger' versions of themeselves.  Bizarro branding even appeared in an episode of "South Park", with the little Bizarro versions of the Colorado kids appearing identical, but with goatees.

It was from this perspective that I decided to start comparing the two bands.  And what I found is that Alkaline Trio is indeed the Bizarro blink-182.