Eileen is watching the Oscars, and since it would drive her crazy if I spent all night yelling at the tv (who am I kidding, I'll be doing that anyway), I'm going to keep a running diary of the absurdity.

7:08 PM: The first awful anthropomorphism of the award statue as a cad named Oscar. "Are you going home with Oscar tonight?"

7:15 PM: During an interview with Renee Zzellwweggerr, they mention how last year she looked fat because she was filming Bridget Joneses's Diary 2: Sitting On Your Couch and Eating Ice Cream Out of the Carton. Then they proceeded to pan down as if to prove that yes, she is skinny this year.

7:34 PM: Chris Rock is hosting, and he's already making fun of stuff. That could be the only saving grace of the next 3 hours of my life.

7:42 PM: Do they have to give out awards? Can this just be 3 hours of Chris Rock ripping other actors, because this is the funniest thing I've seen in a long time.

7:52 PM: I love how Halle Berry just smiled away her slam from Chris Rock about Catwoman. How could she complain that she didn't get a big enough role in X-Men, then star in that piece of crap? And how do they choose who's going to present the awards? They just announced that Robin Williams is coming up, is he presenting the award for "Lifetime Achievement in playing the same role over and over again"?

8:04 PM: If you're going to sing something in another language, please oh please let it be 99 Luftballons.

8:14 PM: Now they're showing highlights of the Scientific and Technical Awards, which aren't good enough to present tonight because the people actually do something complicated and useful. Rather than "wear fancy clothes and act like divas".

8:21 PM: I've seen like 10 clips from the movie Sideways so far, and I still have absolutely no clue what, if anything, the movie was about.

8:23 PM: It certainly seems like The Aviator is going to win all the awards tonight, so it's good that that's the one nominated movie I bothered to see this year.

8:31 PM: Whew, that was close. I thought for a minute there a movie about Tupac was going to win something, which would have guaranteed 6 more years of Tupac albums even though he's already released more albums in death than in life.

8:47 PM: Whether staged or not, that intro with Adam Sandler was horribly awkward. It's amusing to note that, while I've seen only one of the best picture nominees, I've seen *all* of the Best Visual Effects nominees.

8:53 PM: I almost forgot that Counting Crows performance, which finally answered that age-old question "is it possible to be both balding and have dreadlocks at the same time?"

8:58 PM: Oh god, someone just said "I started fantasizing about Oscar". It's a statue, people, not a person. That just sounds so wrong.

9:05 PM: And Andrew Lloyd Webber makes an appearance, taking a break from writing Cats 2: I Dance Dance Dance and I Dance Dance Dance. Beyonce is wearing enough costume jewelry to reenact the movie Titanic all by herself.

9:31 PM: The question needs to be asked, what's the deal with Carlos Santana? Whenever he's performing, he's always with somebody else. Why doesn't he ever sing for himself? Is he like the Sirens, where if we ever heard his voice we would impale ourselves on rocks? I think if I hung around outside his house for awhile, even I could sing on one of his albums.

9:36 PM: This new gimmick where the nominees all stand on stage and try not to look too angry when they lose really puts a spotlight on how all the men dress exactly alike. While the women spend months trying to get some foofy designer to make an ugly dress for them, every man wears the same tuxedo (although if you're Peter Jackson, your tuxedo is 8 sizes too small). Just once I'd like to see a guy up there in a leisure suit, or a t-shirt and jeans.

9:58 PM: And it's official: Beyonce is overexposed. By tomorrow she'll be dancing with vacuum cleaners and singing about the Quarter Pounder with Cheese.

10:00 PM: Prince is even creepier than the skit about him on SNL implies.

10:03 PM: Sean Penn is not only weird, but there's still a few squirrels on his head. He should see about getting them removed.

10:06 PM: "Hilary Swank is the first woman to be nominated for best actress for playing a boxer". What the hell? In that case, couldn't they have nominated Spider-man 2 for something? First use of a man with 4 mechanical arms?

10:09 PM: Did Hilary Swank really just thank her lawyers? "I'd like to thank my yard guy, and the plumber who unclogged the toilet yesterday, and the lady down the street with all the cats, thank you for always believing in me."

10:15 PM: Since that hilarious beginning, they haven't let Chris Rock say much except when he was interviewing people who, like me, never saw the pretentious nominated movies.

10:18 PM: Are they ever going to get to the awards that people care about?

10:31 PM: ...15 minutes later, Jamie Foxx is finally done talking.

10:41 PM: Best. n. Superior to the average. Was Million Dollar Baby really the best movie of the year? It's only made $55 million over 3 months despite being hyped up for the Oscars. You'd have to pay me about $55 million to get me to sit through it, and I'd have voted for any of the nominees for Best Animated Feature instead of it. It's good to have awards for artistic merit rather than popularity (Grammy's, take note), but it would be nice if just once they'd give the award to a movie that wasn't clearly made for the sole purpose of garnering Academy Awards. My Best Picture: Spider-Man 2. With best short film going to Kitty Cat Dance and best Animated Feature going to the epic tale of tragedy and heartbreak...Badger Badger Badger: An Ode to the Fragility of Life in the Great Plains.

Techno and Boy Bands

Time of Popularity: Boy bands: 1997 (can you believe it?) - 2001, Techno: 1999-2001.
Ripped off the musical stylings of: Boy bands: earlier boy bands like New Kids on the Block and Menudo. Techno: every artist and filmmaker whose work was shamelessly sampled and repeated over a boring beat.
Trademark sound: Boy bands: nonthreatening harmonies and ballads, with the occasional choreographed dance move. Techno: I believe that Strong Bad says it better than I ever could.
Most Successful Artists: N*Sync, the Backstreet Boys, a gaggle of artists with the word "DJ" in their names somewhere.
Band with the most staying power: Justin Timberlake. Is any techno still popular? Moby I guess?
Clothing: Boy bands: nonthreatening, preppy outfits. Techno: glow sticks, pacifiers, and ridiculously huge pants reminiscent of M.C. Hammer so as to be large enough to store as many different designer club drugs as possible.
Long-term contribution to society: Well boy bands gave us Justin Timerlake who gave us last year's Super Bowl halftime controversy which gave us more stringent FCC regulations. So it is the boy bands' fault that all of television has a 5 second delay and anything more racy than The O'Reilly Factor is prefaced by eighteen warning labels and has to be shown late at night or on cable. Techno reversed decade-long trends of declining drug use by teens, as every spoiled rich kid in America purchased a fake ID and went off in search of an abandoned warehouse where some no-name with a turntable could play other people's songs and call himself a musician. The kids, in an effort to forget that the music was repetitive and horrible, would purchase ecstasy and suck on pacifiers while worshipping the one kid who spent 14 hours a day twirling a glow-stick around in front of a mirror at home because he had no job. Although there was the one positive contribution: CSI: Miami would never again be without a plot, as they could always fall back on "techno club owner kills dancer who may or may not have been smuggling drugs".
The Last Word: Like I said last time, if you were a teen in the late 90's your choice of popular music was between groups of five homoerotic boys with bleach-tipped hair dancing like puppets, snowboarders covered in tattoos with metal barbells through any loose skin on their bodies screaming incoherently, or DJ NoTalentHack mixing a bunch of other actual musicians' songs together over a spine-rattlingly repetitive kick drum. If you're just out of college right now and still deciding on a profession, you may want to choose "therapist". Someone will make millions off these kids.

Next Time: Emo

I will continue the musical montage later today, but I just wanted to say one thing about tonight's Academy Awards (this year's tally of "number of Best Picture nominated movies I've seen": 1). If, during any of the pre-show interviews or the actual ceremony, any of the actors or actresses refer to "Oscar" as if it is a person, I may spontaneously throw up. That is all.

My name is CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS....

Nu-Metal

Time of Popularity: You've got me, I'll say 1999-2002
Ripped off the Musical Stylings of: Rap and heavy metal. I guess. More rap than metal.
Trademark sound: The sound of hicks rapping, the sound of guitars being stuffed into amplifiers, the sound of Tony Hawk doing a killer ollie while promoting Mountain Dew, the sound of having something...anything...pierced.
Most Successful Artists: I totally forgot about the Mighty Mighty Bosstones when I was talking about ska. In this case it'd have to be the aforementioned Mr. Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and a whole bunch of bands with names like "Staind" or "Trapt" or "Untalentd".
Band with the most staying power: I guess it would be Linkin Park unless you'd group A Perfect Circle in with these others. I know one thing, after the unintentionally-homosexual "red light green light" song and the song with the Speak and Spell, it sure ain't Limp Bizkit.
Clothing: Are full-body-tattoos considered clothing?
Long-term contribution to society: That's an easy one. Long after the last person finally admits that Kid Rock is just a bumpkin who can yell really loud and the last regretful pierced tongue has grown back, todays teens will still have those tattoos that the guy said were the Japanese symbol for tranquility. It also gave us the notion of Xtreme everything, cell phones that play bad music, the musical bane of my existence mp3s, and all that is wrong with society.
The Last Word: Nu-metal made ska and swing look like Beethoven and Brahms. Plus it stuck around way too long and was much more mainstream that either of its predecessors. And think about the next 2 genres which were both popular at the same time: techno and boy bands. The turn of the century was a scary scary time, and that's even without planes falling out of the sky and banks losing all of our financial data.

Next Time: Techno and Boy Bands, a pair as American as apple pie and baseball.

As we continue our stroll down memory lane, we take a look at the next subgenre to hit the big time...

Swing

Time of Popularity: 1998
Ripped off the musical stylings of: Big band. Basically it was ska for older or more "classy" kids.
Trademark sound: Swingin' piano and the sound of something you'd hear at your grandparents' house after the Perry Como record ended.
Most Successful Artists: Brian Setzer Orchestra, although there were a few other bands with lame names like "Big Bad Voodoo Daddy" that had overplayed singles as well.
Band with the most staying power: Mr. Setzer is still around, but if Brian Setzer records an album and no one buys it, does it make a sound?
Clothing: Surprise surprise, if you wanted to listen to the music of your grandparents, you had to wear something from their closet. You also had to sip martinis and take months of lessons to learn how to dance.
Long-term contribution to society: Following in the footsteps of ska, the swing craze gave us movies where disaffected teens would suddenly burst into choreographed swing dancing at their prom. It also proved that *every* style of music will eventually become popular again, no matter how drastically it seems to clash with all that the current generation seems to stand for.
The Last Word: Like a supernova, swing swiftly blazed into being and just as quickly flamed out. Unlike ska bands, who espoused the mantra of never "selling out", swing bands quickly cashed in on their new-found success. And as fast as marketers could make a Gap commercial with people swing dancing in their khakis (vintage khakis, I'm sure) to Brian Setzer, swing music disappeared from the airwaves. It'll be back in 2050.

Next time: Rap/rock "Nu-metal"

As a commemoration of the Grammy Awards and the fact that indie music is on its last legs as the current hip genre, I thought I'd take a look back at the other popular music we've had since the Grunge/Alternative revolution of the early 90's. I'll do one at a time, so I can milk this as long as possible and have something to post about for awhile.

Ska

Time of Popularity: 1997-98
Ripped off the musical stylings of: reggae, early punk, and big band.
Trademark sound: lilting upstroke guitar, trumpets, saxophones, and the occasional vocal solo where the lead singer tried to sound Jamaican.
Most Successful Artists: Once upon a time Sublime and No Doubt pretended they were ska, but neither was purely a ska band (and No Doubt just did it because it was popular at the time). The real ska band with the most mainstream success was probably Reel Big Fish, but none of them really hit it big.
Band with the most staying power: Honestly, none. The only ones who are still around either moved to a different sound (Less than Jake) or haven't recorded anything worthwhile in years (Reel Big Fish).
Clothing: Thanks to the ska scene, thrift stores went from being a means for the less fortunate to obtain clothing to a means for middle-class suburban kids to show how totally ska they were by getting cheap 3-piece suits to wear to concerts and custodial uniforms with other people's names on them. Black and white checkerboard patterns were also popular, although I'm not exactly sure why.
Long-Term Contribution to Society: Ska bands rekindled the tradition of bands appearing in movies as themselves playing at a teenager's ridiculously over-the-top party or prom. Of course the fad ended this past year when Simple Plan appeared in New York Minute along with the Olsen twins, but not much else is left from the ska era.
The Last Word: Considering the choices at the time (freaking Dishwalla had a hit song on the alt-rock stations), ska's popularity makes more sense, but it managed to get old and tiresome without ever really making the leap to the mainstream. The omnipresent ska image of suits and custodial uniforms caused a backlash against the genre without any of the bands having songs get overplayed on the radio.

Next time: Swing

If you're a loyal reader, you know that I love railing on the Atkins Diet and others of its ilk. Atkins, South Beach, The Hamptons, they're all about starving your body of some nutrients while loading up on others. Although the fad is starting to die, you can still see more of a focus on low-carb foods at restaurants and the grocery store with no mention of saturated fats or cholesterol.

It's been pretty well known for awhile now, and especially after the movie SuperSize Me, that fast food restaurants are not a good place to go for anyone who cares the least bit about their own health. Despite what the hip woman on the McDonalds ad claims in her lilting rhymes, the salad...may..be..green....but it comes...with...fattening ranch dressing.....and pieces..of..fried chicken.

The interesting thing, though, is that while McDonalds is bending over backwards trying to convince people that their food is healthy, they aren't *nearly* as bad as a lot of restaurants who people just assume are healthy because of their cuisine.

Take, for instance, P.F. Chang's China Bistro. There is a location across the street from me, and I can assure you that the food is delicious. People assume that Chinese food is healthy, especially with the amount of rice it comes with, but here's a comparison of a McDonalds Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese to P.F. Chang's Orange Peel Beef:

By any measure, Atkins or not, you're better off going to McDonalds (and not ordering fries) than eating "healthy" Chinese food. And I didn't just pick out the worst one, the vast majority of the food on the menu at P.F. Changs is much much worse for you than greased-up McDonalds specials. Except, ironically, for McDonalds' new "Chicken Selects". If the annoying paranoid guy in the commercial really wanted to keep his coworkers from eating his chicken selects, all he needed to to was tell them the nutrition information.

But how about a Chipotle (exactly like Tomatillo's in St. Louis) Vegetarian burrito. It's vegetarian, so it must be healthy, right? Well yes, but only if it's the only thing you eat all day. It has 1120 calories and 75% of your daily suggested intake of saturated fat.

Or how about Panera (St. Louis Bread Company) salads? It's Breadco, and it's a salad, but the Greek salad has a ridiculous 48 grams of fat. That's more than the double quarter pounder with cheese.

The point is that everyone is putting pressure on McDonalds and the "unhealthy" restaurants to serve healthier food, but those places never pretended like they were good for you. Places like the Bread Company specifically advertise the health benefits of eating there, and mock "unhealthy" eateries like McDonalds, then ratchet up the calories and fat behind the scenes. Because it seems like it should be healthy, no one asks any questions. And we haven't even gotten into any of the American, Crazy Crap on the Wall restaurants like TGI Fridays and Applebees that serve things like "Pizzadillas".

McDonalds may have worst ad campaign ever, but when it comes to nutrition they really aren't as bad as they seem. If you're really trying to lose weight, you're better off eating a stick of butter than going out to eat.

Much has been made over the GoDaddy.com Super Bowl ad, featuring an impossibly-huge-chested woman going before an FCC-like committee to demonstrate her idea for a Super Bowl ad. They originally bought two spots but their second ad was rejected by Fox, so they agreed to show the same ad twice during the game (read all about it at the company founder's weblog). However, rather than airing the ad a second time, Fox showed a promo for The Simpsons.

Rumors are flying about why the ad was pulled. GoDaddy blames the NFL for calling Fox and making them pull the ad (Fox, remember, has shows about wife-swapping and plastic surgery. Any given promo for one of these shows is infinitely more offensive than GoDaddy's ad), but I wouldn't be surprised if GoDaddy themselves paid off Fox to pretend to pull it the second time around.

In a year of incredibly tame, lame Super Bowl ads, GoDaddy was the one company to take a chance and it is paying off for them in a ginormous amount of free publicity (including this very post). The buzz is only magnified by the rumors of the crusty NFL pulling the plug, and completely overshadows the fact that no one knows what, if anything, GoDaddy.com does.

I'll save you a trip to their horribly busy website and tell you that they are yet another entrant in the sea of companies that will sell you a domain name and host your site. That makes this post 10 times as informative as the ad, which is the real complaint rather than whether it was too "racy". Have we as a society really sunk so low that people waste their time complaining about an attractive woman on television? I guess these are the same people that camp out at the Michael Jackson trial with the "Free Jacko" signs and beg for his autograph. It's time for some folks to get a job.

I promise I haven't given up on posting. This is just the first day off I've had in the last 12 days, and I've been working 12-hour shifts for the past week (including last weekend) supporting the new Cerner.com that my team just rolled out.

But now that no one probably checks this site anymore, assuming I've pulled an Aaron Beckerman and dropped off the face of the Earth, I figured it's a good time to return. So much has happened since the last time I posted, like the Patriots advancing to the Super Bowl again and our illustrious president saying that the State of our Union is kick ass, rock rock on!

As someone whose only source of news for the past week is the Daily Show and PTI, I can't really comment on the election in Iraq (or even the latest episode of the OC, the even-less-tivo-like-device is quite backed up), but I can do my final NFL pick of the year.

NE vs. PHI: Despite the loudmouth Eagles and the constant updates on the state of Terrell Owens' ankle ("has screws in it") and dispatches from Freddie Mitchell-land ("I'm a first-round bust with 20 catches this year, look at me look at me!"), the Patriots will once again take home the title. Not because their coach is a genius or becuase they're a dynasty, just because they actually seem like they're more interested in playing the game than getting endorsement deals. NE