Jay Leno won the “Late Night Wars” how, exactly???

Those who know me personally know my stand on the earthshaking “Late Night Wars” of the past few months, but for those of you who don’t, the title of this blog should pretty well give you an idea.

Last night, after a 7-month “hiatus”, Jay Leno returned as host of the Tonight Show. And lovers of good comedy everywhere attempted to stab themselves with hilarious foldaway plastic knives or shoot themselves with guns that unfolded a “BANG!” sign upon pulling the trigger. Pretending to slip on a banana peel, falling down, getting up, and yelling “Taa-DAAA!!!” is funnier than Jay Leno has been in the last forever, and yet there he stood last night with that homey, common-man smirk and his huge chin and the head wiggle and the disingenuous, beady-eyed grin. And those at home who wouldn’t know a good joke if it kicked them in the throat smiled widely, settled into their plastic-covered couches, patted their new Reader’s Digest reassuringly, and checked the TV Guide to make sure that the 700 Club was on next just like always. Thank you, Jesus. Everything is back to “normal” again. And by normal, I mean nauseatingly stupid.

While Conan O’Brien, that of the competent writing staff, a clever wit, and jokes that actually cause people to laugh is barred, per his buy-out agreement with NBC, from doing so much as a 2-minute interview on TV until September, there’s Leno back to work, laughing at his own jokes, riffing feebly with Kevin “I’m trapped on this show and can’t find the exit” Eubanks, and filling the television with his patented version of awful.

So how did the “Late Night King of Comedy” (his marketing staff’s words) fill the time on his celebrated and triumphant return to the late night stage?

By opening with a skit that satirized (term used loosely) the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy wakes up at the end of the movie and realizes that the whole thing had just been a weird dream. Except in this case, it’s Jay opening his eyes to find that the last 7 months had just been “a dream”, parts of it “wonderful” and parts of it “not so nice”. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to use some chat parlance here, namely “WTF?” Oh yes, Jay. Having a show in prime time instead of late night is a real hardship. I’m sure Toothless Joe on the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Life is Nothing but Pain and Misery Road can really relate to your trials and tribulations of the past 7 months when he’s light on handouts and starting to get the ol’ crack withdrawal itch. You’re such a trooper, Jay Leno. What a brave man. What happened to you “retiring”, Jay? When was that no longer a thing? I could have sworn that you were graciously stepping aside to allow new blood on the Tonight Show after hosting it for 27,000 years. And now you open your show by joking (term used loosely) that you’re awakening from a dream, parts of which were “not so nice”. You literally couldn’t wait 15 seconds after getting your show back before taking a ham-handed shot at your employers WHO GAVE YOU BACK EVERYTHING THAT YOU WANTED and Conan O’Brien, who got screwed out of the show that he was promised and that he earned. Oh screw you, Jay Leno.

After basking in a self-congratulatory glow vis-a-vis Leno’s sheeple audience giving him a standing ovation for (being a cutthroat back-room double-crossing a**hole) his triumphant return, he launched into a typical lackluster monologue. It didn’t help that Leno seems to have returned to the Tonight Show with a mild case of Alzeimer’s. Jokes about Dick Cheney and George W. Bush? You do realize that this is no longer 2005, don’t ya, Jay?

Let’s see – we next got a skit called “The World’s Tightest Pants” about a guy with *wait for it* really tight pants. Go get the duct tape, Ma. Imma have to tape up mah belly before mah sides split. No explanation from the Tonight Show “writers” besides “we only had 5 seconds to come up with an idea and we were all already hungover” would be good enough to explain such an unfunny idea. It’s not even unfunny. It’s ANTIfunny. Instead of a signal traveling across my brain telling me that I should laugh, a signal travels across my brain that I need to break something. THIS is what cost Conan his job? The World’s Tightest f*cking Pants???

Then followed an interview with Jamie Foxx, which kinda falls in line with Jay’s overall view on comedy. If all of your jokes are, instead of actually being funny, nothing but easily-understood clunkers that appeal to them middle Americans who don’t wanna hafta think much when they’s a-listenin’ to Mr. Jokey Man, why not interview Jamie Foxx, who isn’t very funny either and has such a high personal opinion of himself that he doesn’t really need an interviewer? The man practically interviews himself. (Seriously, Mr. Foxx, your biggest movie being an impersonation of somebody far more talented than yourself and your biggest collaboration being one with Kanye West does not an otherworldly resume make. You are far more of a superstar in your own mind than you are in reality.)

But it works. He loves himself almost as much as Jay Leno does, so he was an ideal choice as second-first Jay Leno guest. I particularly enjoyed the part where Jamie led the audience in a rendition of “Welcome Back”. “When I say ‘welcome’, you say ‘back’! Welcome!” “Back!” “Welcome!” “Back!” It was at this point where I actively noticed myself forgetting faces, dates, and memories, as several thousand of my brain cells began committing seppuku en masse.

What else, what else? Oh, Alan Greenspan is old and appears boring. Oh HO! You certainly have a finger on the pulse of America, Mr. Leno. Tiger Woods jokes? Yep, we got those, too. You notice how those new chocolate Cheerios are like regular Cheerios, but they’re chocolate? Zing. I’d normally be the first to ask where they hid the million monkeys on the million typewriters that typed up these “jokes”, but there’s nobody available to answer me. They’re all busy digging a million monkey graves for all the monkeys that died of soul-crushing boredom from trying so hard to make Jay Leno appear like an actual comedian last night.

Gold medal skier Lindsey Vonn was also on last night, so Jay could crack some “titillating” (stupid) jokes (about how her husband is also her trainer; *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge*) that went over about as well as jokes about overeating at an Oprah Winfrey Fan Club meeting. It’s as if he’s knows that he is just SO unfunny and SO intellectually lazy. And he knows that he will be sitting at that desk, grinning inanely, until he drops dead one day, 25 years from now, while joking about forgetting to turn his blinker off in his hover car.

And yes, there’s the return of “Jaywalking”, as you might imagine. You know, that bit where he walks around the streets of L.A. and asks people something like “what country is Canberra the capital of?” and then they say “Austria” instead of “Australia” and Jay leads millions of viewers in a good laugh at the expense of the poor idiot who doesn’t know the capital of Australia. “Ha ha, you’re a little rusty on your southern hemisphere geography. Boy are you a f*cking moron! Ha ha!” Humor, ladies and gentleman! Comedy gold! Meanwhile, let’s all try to ignore the fact that 80% of the audience doesn’t know the goddamn answer either. Then there’s “Headlines” where a poor, overworked copywriter’s misspelling or the wedding announcement of Joe Blow and Lisa Job is mocked for all the world to see. I guess that if you can’t come up with a decent joke, you just outright embarrass somebody. Jay Leno, man of the people.

But it makes sense. It makes perfect sense that Jay Leno got his way and “won” the “Late Night Wars”, while Conan O’Brien, a man who is funnier than Jay Leno when he’s asleep, was paid off and banned from television for the next 6 months. After all, Jay is the epitome of mediocrity in mediocre times. He is the King of Meh, the Sultan of *shrug*. In an age where intelligent people and graduates of prestigious schools are reviled by those lesser than them, where “elitist” and “intellectual” are not compliments but insults, why shouldn’t Jay be back in his mediocre chair at his mediocre desk, blathering his mediocre jokes on his mediocre show?

You asked for it, America, and you got it. You don’t want to have to think too hard to get your laughs? You got it. Is witty doubletalk, silly skits, and a comedian who can actually think on the fly too much for your wittle brain to handle? You got it. Do you enjoy swallowing hook, line and sinker the whopper that Jay Leno is a down-home “common man” while he has 3 million corvettes sitting in the football-field-sized parking garage next to his shopping-mall-sized mansion? Whatever. Believe what you will. There’s no talking sense into you. By the way, tonight’s featured guest is Sarah Palin. Yeah. Sarah Palin. Of course she is. I await the hilarity.

Jay Leno is the Once and Future King of late night comedy. Whether any of you like it or not. Stupidity wins. “Good enough” tops “good”. Who said being a conniving half-ass never pays off? Witness today’s American Dream in action. And it sure as hell ain’t very funny.

Facebook social gaming (is) for dummies

I want to tell you a tale, dear reader, a tale of good and evil, of laughs and tears, of mind-numbingly stupid ‘pack mentality’ behavior, and of dark, dark addiction. You may think that you’re immune, that you’re strong enough to resist, that nobody that YOU know could ever fall prey to the sticky fingers of temptation. But you’re wrong. Look around. The bags under the eyes of Darrell, the mailboy. The blistered fingers of Mary, the frumpy receptionist. And look at yourself. The nervous twitch. The staring at the clock. That’s right. All of you are addicted. Helpless. Victims of that deadly drug called…

Facebook social gaming!

Sometime late in 2007, I logged onto the burgeoning social site Facebook for the first time, just to have a look. Back then, deep in the murky mists of time, the Interwebs were all about the MySpace and the Netscape Navigator and the MSN Encarta… ok, maybe it wasn’t THAT far back, but Twitter had yet to take over the blogosphere so that should tell you a big, frightening, lost-in-the-jungle kind of something. Life without Twitter?!? Oh the humanity!!!

Anyhow, when I logged on to Facebook for the first time, it was still in its “pupa” phase. Only college students could log in. The only “networks” were college networks. The only “groups” were college groups. (Imagine! A time in Facebook’s history when joining a “Can this roll of toilet paper get more fans than Adam Lambert?” was not an option. Oh, the past. How I miss you sometimes…). I inwardly shrugged and moved on, little realizing that the next time I checked Facebook would CHANGE MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE!!!!!

Fast forward to April of 2008, the next time the random thought popped into my head that I should check out Facebook again, in case something had changed. Interestingly, this behavior would be an eerie foreshadowing of my current Facebook usage, where I will check my Facebook, move onto something else, and then check my Facebook again 10 minutes later “in case something had changed”. Anyway, imagine my surprise when Facebook was nothing like it had been the previous winter. Now it was open to the public. Anybody could join, college student or not, and people were scrambling to get in on the ground floor of the newest and hottest social site in the world.

As the thousands of users ballooned into the hundreds of thousands and then the millions, some clever entrepreneurs realized the marketing potential of such a marketplace and began formulating ideas as to how to make the cashola. Facebook didn’t (and still doesn’t) have the video capability to host cutting-edge, graphic-intensive games as seen on the Playstation 3 or XBox 360. And millions of users or not, nobody could make enough money off of advertising alone, even with such a huge user base. So what to do?

Enter the advent of passive social gaming. When I logged on that fateful day in April 2008, I happened to stumble across a new “application” (tied-in installable programs on FB are called applications) called Mousehunt. It was in its infancy, as was much on FB in those days, and I thought it was a cute and clever little game. So I installed it. Facebook applications are absolutely free. You can install whatever you choose and ignore whatever you choose. Facebook is what you make it. But there are many people who would love to somehow siphon a little bit of money from you while you try to find your long lost high school classmates or your favorite band to follow. And Mousehunt is one such example.

The object (and I use that term loosely) of the game is to pick a mouse trap and one out of many varieties of cheese, “travel” to a location in the game, be it a meadow, a mountain, or a town’s streets, and then…wait. And wait. And wait. Every 15 minutes, as long as you are actively logged in, you will have the opportunity to “sound the horn”, i.e. try for a mouse catch. Sometimes you catch a mouse. If you do, you are awarded points and gold depending on the mouse you catch. You use the gold to buy better, stronger, more expensive traps, or better, more expensive cheese. Sometimes you catch nothing. Sometimes a mouse actually defeats the trap and steals gold, points, or cheese from you.

Herein lies one-half of the genius of passive social games. You don’t actually DO anything. Even if you’re not logged in, as long as you have a baited trap, the game will give you a chance at a catch every hour. The next time you do check your trap, Mousehunt shows you the result of all of the “hunts” you participated in while you were away. So easy! But here’s the OTHER half of the genius of social games – the real super-MEGA genius of passive gaming. Are you tired of slogging through the game’s backstory or wimpy levels while more advanced players are far beyond you, basking in their glow of fat pockets of gold? Do you not want to have to spend such a long time collecting gold for that super-awesome trap that you desperately want? No problem. There’s a way around that. Guess what it is. Yep, pull out your credit card and start forking over the cash.

When I started playing Mousehunt in April 0f 2008, HitGrab, Inc., the little group of guys who created Mousehunt, ran the game on a half-dozen servers in the corner of some modest office building in Ontario, Canada. There were constant game hiccups, issues to iron out, and lagging problems. You know what fixes problems like that? Money, and lots of it. The developers offer a special kind of cheese, Superbrie, that has a very high attraction rate for mice. Tired of sitting in a difficult location and watching mice walk off with 4 out of every 5 pieces of your cheese? Fork over a 20 and in return you’ve got a few hundred pieces of Superbrie in your inventory. Suddenly, you have more success catching mice, you get more gold to buy traps faster than those who don’t donate and you’re moving through the game faster. And all you had to do was pay real money in order to catch virtual mice that have  absolutely no value in reality.

HitGrab will never reveal their total “donations” for their game, but I think that hundreds of thousands of dollars would be a feasible figure. HitGrab’s pet project Mousehunt has now been joined with their second foray into social gaming, MythMonger. The half-dozen servers have grown to several dozen. The old, semi-crummy office is out and a new, swanky office is in. Instead of a few guys slaving over code, they now have a paid staff. They even have an online store with Mousehunt-themed items that you can buy, like shirts, mousepads, coffee mugs, etc. This is all thanks to the nearly 500,000 monthly users of Mousehunt (players that log on Mousehunt at least once a month) and their 500,000 wallets that could, at any time, open to pad HitGrab’s bank account. Once a month might not seem like much, but probably 50,000 of those log on every day. I’m pretty much one of them. I still play Mousehunt, and if I don’t log on EVERY day, it’s nearly every day. It’s a rare day that I don’t check Mousehunt at least once at some point. In the nearly 2 years I’ve played, I’ve accumulated over 56 million points (which puts me in the top 1200 worldwide) and have caught over 22,000 mice (top 500 worldwide). But does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Of course not. It means nothing. Absolutely nothing.

As large as the piece of the pie that Mousehunt commands when it comes to social gaming, it is nothing compared to the big dog of Facebook – Zynga Games. Mousehunt’s 500,000 monthly users may seem impressive, but when stacked against Zynga’s flagship game Farmville, it’s a drop in a bucket. In Farmville, the player plants crops, harvests trees, and milks cows to (you guessed it) accumulate gold. With this gold, one can build farm buildings, plant more crops, increase the size of your farm and generally put together a nice little country scene to look at. How popular is this quaint little time-waster? Farmville currently has 83 million monthly users. The number of people who log onto Farmville at least once a month eclipses populations of entire small countries. You can play Farmville without paying a dime if you so choose. But (naturally) if you want the REALLY cool buildings or decorations or trees or animals, get out the credit card because only REAL money will afford the player the most desireable farm properties.

I play Farmville, too. Leora got started on it a few months ago as a way to cool down after a hard day’s work. And after a while, I went ahead and installed it as well. After all, what’s the harm? You get to watch your little guy or girl walk around and till some soil, plant some seeds, etc. You feel like you’re really DOING something, that you’re a budding amateur architect, an artist even. With a few clicks of the mouse, entire buildings can razed and built, animals moved to their pens, trees planted, entire environments created from scratch. In that world, you are God.

Zynga is also the brains behind Mafia Wars, another application taking the Facebook world by storm. Although not quite as popular as Farmville, Mafia Wars currently boasts a player population of roughly 40 million, every one of them a potential gold mine for Zynga. As can easily be guessed, in Mafia Wars, the player’s goal is to purchase expensive properties, armies of bodyguards and machine guns and armored trucks to amass a fortune. In this game, you are not only God, but the Godfather.

So after you have spent hundreds of dollars to leapfrog non-paying players in the point standings and have purchased the greatest mouse trap or fanciest chalet-styled farmhouse or warehouse full of Gatling guns, you’ve won, right? Therein lies the problem and addictive format of passive social games. You literally CAN’T win. You will never win. Because the game never ends. There is no ending point. No ‘Congratulations, you win. Game over’ screen. You just keep going and going. Perfect for the creators of a game styled towards players who grew up playing basic ‘beginning – middle – end’ games throughout their childhood. In Super Mario, you win when you save the princess. In most fighting games, you win when you beat the biggest, baddest guy. In these games, you will never win. But millions of players keep playing as if they’re heading towards an eventual final goal – a goal that literally does not exist.

Now from these descriptions, how can one not start sensing the correlation between these games and cigarettes or alcohol or drugs? I’m not about to be “that guy” who is shrieking about the “dangers” of gaming or any of that nonsense, but seriously. You can start for free, you can only get the “good stuff” if you hand over some cash, and you will never, ever win. This sounding familiar to the junkies out there yet? The only logical next step is for Zynga to just go ahead and release Farmville’s sequel, Crackville. At some point nearly every single day, the thought crosses my mind that “I’d better check Mousehunt” and “dangit, I need to harvest my crops”. To what end? I have no answer for that. I’d like to think that it’s just boredom and downtime that keeps me playing, because the alternative is that I’m just waiting for the other lemmings to jump off the cliff so I can take my turn.

Is it bragging rights? Who am I going to brag to? “Yeah dude, I hit level 30 on Farmville. I unlocked the Cabbage, so I can plant cabbages now. They bring in good gold.” Ten years ago, a conversation like this would get you mocked to your face if you were lucky, locked away in a mental institution if you weren’t. To make matters worse, Zynga has amped up the “social” aspect of their games by allowing gift-giving as part of the gameplay. Every day, you can send the Facebook friends who also have installed that particular game little gifts, like a tree in Farmville, and so forth. That encourages like-minded friends to increase their inventory by helping out their friends – “if I send Nancy a tree, hopefully she’ll send me back that goat that I need”. It is supposed to make the game feel more interactive and “real” but what it ends up feeling like, after the initial fun of the game wears off, is a carefully-maintained clusterf*ck of enabling behavior. Facebook is home to hundreds of games just like these. Most aren’t as popular as Farmville, or even Mousehunt, but they’re out there, looking for a piece of the pie.

I couldn’t honestly say that Farmville is “fun” or that Mousehunt is “fun”. It’s more of a chore, a routine that must be followed. After all, I have a high place on the scoreboard that must be maintained. And if I stopped playing, I would lose that. And beyond that, I can’t really think of a single reason to keep playing. I’ve played Mousehunt almost every day for nearly TWO YEARS. Why do I keep playing? I honestly can’t tell you a reason that doesn’t sound just completely pitiful. There is a virtual group that Facebookers can join that is called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia”. It currently has over 5 million members. And the funny thing is that I’m tempted to join even though I “have” a farm, because this kind of pack behavior is something that I generally mock to no end. But here I am playing the game.

Chalk me up as a sucker in this instance, I suppose. But at least I’m not using the rent money to buy a Japanese-style pagoda for my farm, or stocking thousands of pieces of superbrie. I must admit that Leora and I have donated for both games, but only once in each case. I know people through Facebook who, from the looks of their farms or mafias, have spent thousands of dollars of REAL MONEY for pixels on a laptop screen. It’s the kind of thing science fiction movies are made of. Just wait until virtual reality gets big. Instead of hanging out with hot chicks or sitting at the virtual beach on the Holodeck, everyone will be farming and checking their mouse traps.

iTunes’ Top 25 Downloaded Songs Ever are playing on an endless loop in Hell

So the big “tech” news this morning was that iTunes has hit the ’10 billion downloaded songs’ mark. For the past couple weeks, Apple had a count-down (count-up?) to 10 billion and whoever was lucky enough to actually download THE 10-billionth song would win a $10,000 gift card to Apple (although a $10 billion gift card would have made more sense; sack up, Apple!!!!). Anyhow, a guy from Georgia downloaded a Johnny Cash song this morning and hit the jackpot. Woohoo for that guy! And woohoo Johnny Cash! I didn’t want to hear how the 10 billionth song ever downloaded from iTunes was from Vanilla Ice or some crap (that’s what the kids are into these days, right? Those damn kids and their damn hammer pants and damn snap bracelets and damn pogs!!!!)

Seeing as how “this guy won the $10,000 gift card and you didn’t” isn’t quite enough to fill in an entire story, Apple also added in a few more interesting factoids, including the 25 songs that have been downloaded the most times in iTunes history. And let me tell you…be sure you don’t have any loaded pistols around when you read this list.

Turns out that “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas is the most downloaded song on iTunes EVAR. This song title, for anyone who’s ever heard it, is shortened from its original title “I Gotta Feeling This Song is the Most Offensive and Terrible Piece of Crap ever Recorded inna Studio”. Haha. Just kidding, Black Eyed Peas. It’s not the “most offensive” or “most terrible” song. I heard that song this morning. The excellently-named Gabe Delahaye over at Videogum.com posted the new earbleed-inducing Ke$ha “video” “Blah Blah Blah” which makes “I Gotta Feeling” look like a thoughtful thesis on melody and societal norms by a group of NYU post-graduate students. Careful – the following video is NSFYS (not safe for your sanity).

OMG, you guys!!! I mean, barf! Ugh. Good thing I had a Pepsi Max here to help me choke down the vomit. Too bad that won’t help the shattered screen on my laptop that I just punched.

Can somebody explain to me how anybody on the face of the Earth could ever not hate this? Also, I am ashamed to live in Denver now, thanks to Denver-based band 3OH!3 having completely flushed what little street cred they had down the crapper by appearing in this video. Good work, 3EW!3. Now The Fray is officially Denver’s biggest band again (another awful and overrated band who appears on the forthcoming list with one of their lite-rock “let’s see if we can sound just like Creed” whinefests, so it’s not as if The Fray “wins” or anything).

By the way, I’m still waiting for some enterprising computer expert to create a modded keystroke that looks like a middle finger that I can replace that idiotic dollar sign with that Ke$ha uses in her “name”. She’s obviously implying that she’s “money” (is that what the kids are calling it these days?) but from the look of the video, maybe Ke¢ha just needs money for shampoo so she can take a hot shower. Somebody scrape the grease off of this skank, please.

Anyway, here are the 25 most downloaded songs ever from iTunes:

1.  Black Eyed Peas, “I Gotta Feeling”
2.  Lady Gaga, “Poker Face”
3.  Black Eyed Peas, “Boom Boom Pow”
4.  Jason Mraz, “I’m Yours”
5.  Coldplay, “Viva La Vida”
6.  Lady Gaga, “Just Dance”
7.  Flo Rida, “Low”
8.  Taylor Swift, “Love Story”
9.  Leona Lewis, “Bleeding Love”
10.  Ke$ha, “Tick Tock”
11.  Rihanna, “Disturbia”
12.  P!nk, “So What”
13.  Katy Perry “I Kissed a Girl”
14.  Beyonce, “Single Ladies”
15.  Katy Perry, “Hot N Cold”
16.  Kanye West, “Stronger”
17.  T.I. feat. Rihanna, “Live Your Life”
18.  Plain White T’s, “Hey There Delilah”
19.  Flo Rida, “Right Round”
20.  Miley Cyrus, “Party in the U.S.A.”
21.  Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin'”
22.  Lady Gaga, “Bad Romance”
23.  Kings of Leon, “Use Somebody”
24.  Owl City, “Fireflies”
25.  The Fray, “How to Save a Life”

Hoo boy. Where to begin? Let’s start with the few dim points of light in the midst of the sea of crushing blackness. I’ll admit it – I don’t hate Lady Gaga. She’s the only artist with three spots in the top 25 and I don’t hate her, as much as I maybe should. But she’s kooky and zany and she’s got the weird-ass hats and her hair is a phone and let’s not forget bubble suit. And when she’s not goofing around, she can sing pretty frickin’ well. So I don’t hate her. Also, Journey? How did this happen? When “Don’t Stop Believin'” is one of the only songs on a “top-whatever” list that I could possibly endure for any length of time, that pretty much sums it up. And then there’s a Coldplay track in there, even though Viva La Vida is an incredibly-mediocre selection and probably not even in my top 50 Coldplay songs. But at least it’s ok. ¾ yay.

The rest of the list couldn’t be any worse if Lucifer warmed up his fire-and-brimstone Les Paul and added in a recording of him strumming a few bars of “It’s a Small World” with a baby kitten skull as a pick. You’ve got another Black Eyed Peas – “Boom Boom Pow”, which gives BEP two out of the top three spots (you’re encouraged to develop musical taste ANNNNNY time now, Planet Earth)….

that terrible Jason Mraz with his disingenuous Jack Johnson impersonation…

the INCREDIBLY overrated Taylor Swift (who outed herself to the entire world as a dreadful singer when she bombed her duet with Stevie Nicks at the Grammies)…

Katy Perry (the original Lady Gaga, who was briefly a big star because she implied that she was a huge hot mess of a lesbian, but is now pretty much known as “that frigid bitch who guest judged American Idol that one time and hated everybody”)…

Flo Rida (because we all know that what the world desperately NEEDED last year was a hip-hop cover of “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)”)…

the Plain White T’s (“Hey There Delilah” probably resulted in a few thousand snap-decision suicidal car crashes into telephone poles)…

Miley Cyrus (maybe the first “musical” “artist” in history whose whole life has been entirely engineered by a soulless corporation (Disney)). “Party in the USA” doesn’t make me even consider partying, unless by “partying” you mean “putting a shotgun blast through my car radio”…

and finally there’s Owl City, a group whose lead singer sounds so effeminate that my 2 1/2 year-old daughter could probably kick his ass and whose big hit “Fireflies” makes Dave Matthews Band sound like GWAR.

All that’s left to say is “where the razor blades at?” Seriously, I think if you play these 25 songs in a row in one sitting, the “horrible-as-shit” vibrations filter through the ether and awaken the armies of Beelzebub. I guess that if there’s one thing that this list should teach us, it’s that mainstream music is just going to get worse, if that’s even possible. If these are the songs that bring in the big bucks to record companies, then these are the kind of songs that are going to continue to be recorded. Why sink a wheelbarrow full of money into a hard-working, up-and-coming alternative band or acoustic artist or small-town rock band when you can just dress the Black Eyed Peas in yarmulke-wearing robot suits, have them fart in a can and set it to a slammin’ drum beat, and hope to God that Fergie doesn’t wet herself on stage (which she has done)?

And if you think it’s bad now, just wait another 7 or 8 years, when tween girls argue over which is the greatest singer ever: Miley Cyrus or Ke¿ha, Britney Spears is dismissed as “too old”, Nickleback is considered “hard rock”, and Metallica are “those old guys who play too loud”. Enjoy the few bright spots of today’s hemorrhaging music industry while they last. You don’t EVEN wanna know who’s going to be the nominees for “Album of the Year” in 2015. I don’t want to give it away, but I’ve been there in my time machine and let’s just say that one of them rhymes with “Doo Doo Golls”…