Stall speed

There isn't a one-month gap between this post and the last one. Not at all.

I find the easiest way to spontaneously put myself in the mood to write something on the blog is to turn on MuchMusic and try to say something cutting about the filth that children these days put into their brains. Unfortunately, I can't quite claim that rationale today. Instead, particularly asinine commentary from a certain Liberal MP with a certain reputation for consistent verbal asininery who appears at an asinine frequency on Politics with Don Newman drove me up the dial this afternoon in search of something that at least knew it was stupid.

Fortunately, every weekday at the same time CBC Newsworld brings the nerds of the world the latest on procedural wranglings in the Senate (oh, that Bill C-288's a slippery one...), MuchMusic brings the recently-home-from-highschool set the cerebral enema that is MuchonDemand -- now, I might add, with a newly-restyled holy-shit-it's-not-2004-anymore "MOD" logo.

Now, on a purely statistical basis, the three frustrated remote-control punches that convey one from channel 19 to 22 should replace the aforementioned idiocy with Matte Babel's smiling countenance and some sort of silly interview with Kelly Clarkson's cleavage. This afternoon, I guess I beat the odds, for what did I happen upon but a bona fide music video premiere? And not just any old video premiere, but the latest from Good Charlotte.

Remember when these guys were young and whiny? To my utmost surprise, I discovered that this is no longer the case. Now they're just whiny.



Watching these fellers decay before our eyes has been a truly terrifying process, and proof that emo is ultimately as subject to the laws of entropy as any other genre. At least the Rolling Stones made it to something like 40 or 50 before they started to look like, well, the Rolling Stones (or at least what my generation has always known them to look like). But these guys? Still well shy of thirty, and the ugly brother (as opposed to the tormented one) is briefly revealed to be quite rebelliously balding under his oh-so-punk porkpie. Balding! Poor dude didn't even get his shot at boinking Hillary Duff before his scalp started going all Phil Collins on him. As if sharing a name with a Disney dog from the late seventies wasn't bad enough.

That said, I think he can take some solace in staying out of the lead in the freak show race. That honour has to go to the creepy-looking keyboard player, who seems to have laid unquestioned claim to the group's Keith Richards slot in terms of embodying Skeletor chic. It took me a few minutes to realize why he was instantly conjuring up images of sexual perversion in my mind, and then I twigged that he's definately got a Riff Raff from the Rocky Horror Picture Show thing going on. As often occurs in such situations, I just called in Wikipedia for snarkiness backup, and it has informed me that when not unexplainedly switching between keyboard and guitar mid-video, the guy's side project is working on a children's book entitled Damious McDreary: A Boy and his Bat, which, cheerily enough, involves a small boy and his pet bat. What's the over-under on the kid cutting himself before the last page?