Allow me to have an Andy Rooney moment: What is WRONG with kids these days?! All they do is listen to crazy, horrible "rocky roll," play "Pong" on their crazy video-game machines, and figure out new, crazy ways of killing themselves on the TubeYou interweb! Speaking of which, why does my great-granddaughter insist on using e-mail? Is the art of calligraphy lost? When I was her age, we wrote proper letters using the Queen's English. Then we'd seal that correspondence with wax, apply our family crest, send the missive via a trustworthy horseman, and four months later, the letter would arrive! That's why I wait four months to respond to any of my great-granddaughter's e-mails and have written her out of my will—because she's a newfangled and ungrateful little whore.

WHOA! That's the trouble with channeling Andy Rooney—once you go to that dark place, it's almost impossible to return. HOWEVER! I do agree with Andy Rooney on one thing: We're facing a generation of young people who will grow up completely disfigured and gross because they won't stop acting all "ex-TREEEEEEME" on YouTube! Example: Go to YouTube and search for the word "faceplant." As of my deadline, there were 8,440 videos on the site under this title, almost all of which include some young person performing an activity that ends in his face getting smashed into cement and his brains oozing out of his squash.

Natural selection? Maybe. But does that mean MTV gets to make money from it? This week, MTV is debuting two new shows in which knuckle-dragging young men try to one-up Jackass—with brain-damaging results.

• Rob Dyrdek's Fantasy Factory (Sun Feb 8, 9 pm): Apparently there's some sort of four-wheeled device called a "scoot board," upon which young people like to kill themselves. I'm assuming Rob Dyrdek is one of these "scoot boarders" who has built a 25,000 square foot "fantasy factory" in which he and his friends attempt all sorts of "ex-TREEEEEEME" "scoot board" tricks, crack their heads on the floor, and then emerge from the hospital drooling and unable to distinguish the difference between a banana and a cow.

• Nitro Circus (Sun Feb 8, 10 pm): The problem with regular, boring circuses? They aren't "nitro-y" enough! They lack a certain... oh, how do you say... "ex-TREEEEEEMity." Thankfully, someone named Travis Pastrana (apparently some famous "freestyle motor-scooter-cross rider"?) and his "totally insane" buddies now have a show in which they attempt to top each other's idiotically retarded stunts on a weekly basis. For example: Backflipping a motor scooter over a ravine, or maybe jumping a Big Wheel 40 feet into the air into a crowded boat dock (crippling innocent bystanders is so "ex-TREEEEEEME"). But dig this quote from the show's press release: "The Nitro Circus crew is a group of tight-knit, highly skilled, adrenalin-addicted friends who always take the action 'to 11' with the hammer down."

See, now I know they're "ex-TREEEEEEME"—only a brain-damaged person would've written that sentence. Wait... Andy Rooney is coming back! I... I... AND ANOTHER THING: Why do they let teenagers hang out at the mall? They scare me... AND THEY DON'T BUY ANYTHING! recommended