1/05/2005 06:33:07 AM|||TEX|||I've been pre-occupied a bit. Too much so to write much of anything. But since it's the new year and I've been subjected to a business trip to Washington, DC I'm back in action.
What does a business trip have to do with anything? Simple, I hate business travel. Actually, I don't like airplanes at all and I like business hotels even less. Crankiness and my desire to write go hand in hand.
DC has been interesting. We're weeks away from the Presidential inauguration but the center of the city looks like it's almost ready for the show. I'd love to stick around and see that, but alas I'm needed elsewhere.
I'd set my sights on writing about the top 20 songs of 2005 for this first post of the new year but my network connection here at my hotel in DC has been very uncooperative. No matter what I do I cannot get connected to Billboard.com to look at the list. Gotta love content screeners that are this random. Why, pray tell, would the Sheraton Hotel chain want to prevent me from looking up the Billboard charts from my room? Who knows? I'll get to that later this week once I'm home.
Not to be left out of another online trend, I'm looking into adding Podcasting to my blog this year. I figure if Michael Butler can Podcast from a seat in coach on his way to Europe I can probably figure out how to make it happen from the comfort of my apartment. This is all a part of my new year's resolution to make the Weak In Rock actually have something to consistently do with music in 2005. No doubt I'll just end up talking about baseball and politics as usual with a bit of music thrown in for the heck of it.
Since I'm just throwing some random thoughts out there to kick off the new year here at the Weak In Rock I have to say something about Pimp My Ride. When it comes to MTV I'd mostly rather eat ground glass than watch any of the crap they pump out, but I got fascinated over the holidays with this show. Not because it's particularly compelling TV action or drama, but simply because it's a great little slice of everything that's wrong with youth culture in the USA today.
If you're unfamiliar with the premise, what they do is sign up young people who own junked out, crappy cars and hook them up with Xzibit who opens the show by mocking their piece of junk car and then takes it to West Coast Custom Auto to have it dramatically customized and turned into a head-turning, super-flashy custom car. The thing is, basic mechanical issues with the car are not addressed. If the engine, transmission or other vital mechanical system is a piece of crap what the participant ends up with is a very flashy lemon. Basically it's all about style over substance - just like most things in youth culture (and the culture at-large) today.
The thing that really annoyed me about Pimp My Ride was the one constant throughout each episode - installation of flat screen TV's, DVD players and PlayStation game consoles in the cars. In a couple of episodes the TV screens were mounted on the dash, so the driver could watch TV or play games from their seat.
????
As if people driving while on the phone wasn't bad enough. The youth of America are apparently likely to be watching DVDs or music videos while driving.
?????????
This is one of those moments where I turn into a cranky old geezer who just simply wants these kids to have their cars and licenses taken away from them. I remember being a teenager. I couldn't pay attention to my driving with nothing more than a passenger and a crackly radio to distract me. And yet these kids are driving around playing Halo.
Um, no.
Makes me want to ride the bus or just stay off the road altogether.
In other news, Randy Johnson is now a NY Yankee. Good grief. Well, at least one can hope for some good Red Sox/Schilling vs. Yankees/Johnson match-ups this season. Still, it's a shame that Johnson's no longer in the National League. I'll miss seeing him flail hopelessly at the ball during his at-bats. That had to be one of the single most entertaining things to watch in baseball over the last few years.
Ok, folks. Again, welcome to 2005. I hope it treats you as well as it has me so far. Next up will be my furrowed-brow evaluation of 2004's top singles.
|||110493732747515036|||Happy 2005...