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! 