Don't try this at home.

When a shitty, inexplicably popular franchise needs to be bashed, sure, you could just sit on the couch and mock it between handfuls of Doritos. But are you really bashing it? Are you applying the full spectrum of sheer scorn that needs to be heaped upon this insult to the collective intelligence of humanity? Or are you just winging it as best you can within your limited scope of insult humor while trying to avoid choking on a Dorito?

In cases like this, it's best to call on the movie bashing professionals at RiffTrax, for quality MST3K-style acts of cinematic destruction:

I am that which I used to mock.

So yesterday morning I found myself alone with both breakfast and the remote, my wife still feeling tired and having gone back to bed. I'd had more than my fill of Michael Jackson coverage (here's the latest: He's still dead), so it was time to head into the outer limits of basic satellite service.

At 5 AM it's mostly a trip into infomercial hell, of course. I had no urge to have the question "Is Colon Detox Hype?" answered, and so too did other such siren calls go unheeded. My normal refuge, Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, was showing something like Home Movies, a crudely-drawn sitcom featuring annoying kids, self-absorbed adults, and not a single speck of actual comedy. Plus for some reason everyone on the show, from the tall to the small, wears footie pajamas 24/7. Seriously.

Finally, shelter was offered in the form of VH1's 120 Minutes, which used to be the MTV show for the latest in alternative rock and pop. Now it's a nostalgia show, its content very much unchanged from the days when it came on after Headbangers Ball.

I had just taken a sip of my coffee and was nodding my head to the beat of the Pet Shop Boys when realization hit me: Here I was, wallowing in nostalgia for my youth, just like the forty-somethings I used to make fun of during my youth. Only now the bands in question were Sonic Youth and Depeche Mode rather than the Grateful Dead and Manfred Mann.

Ah, well. I guess somewhere in my brain it will always be somewhere between 1987 and 1991. It's the karmic price I pay, I guess: Leaving myself an open target for the next generation of smartasses, as those middle-aged men before me.

I won't be going so far as posting "The Circle of Life" or "Sunrise, Sunset" here, but I am willing to throw out some Love and Rockets:



And if I'm playing Love and Rockets then I have to follow up with Sonic Youth (with special guest Chuck D):



And follow that up with XTC:



And end it all with a bang with Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics: