Angry Old Man Rant #2

So, my 16-year old cousin from Hawaii is in town with us for several weeks during the summer. This is not a rant about relatives visiting for extended periods of time...he's a good kid, so no problems there.

However, early one evening I walked in from work and my cousin was asleep on the sofa with the television on. I wasn't really paying attention to what channel it was on, but then suddenly, I hear this guy say something about "talking about sex in front of your parents" and my ears perked up. He then went on to say some moderately surprising things about sex (the details of which I honestly don't remember, but I do recall being surprised at what I was hearing). The thing of it was that I was hearing these things at 7pm at night. I wondered what channel this was on and discovered that the bastion of pop culture, MTV, was the station.

Now, the prude in me is gonna come out here. Do I really need to have (as I would soon discover) relationship expert Dr. Drew explaining sex to teenagers at 7pm in the evening. Okay, I can understand if you put the show on at 10pm, but 7pm? Really?

Whether it be talking about sex or Sacha Baron Cohen's bare ass tipping precariously close to Eminem's face during the MTV Movie Awards (let's not even get into discussing that Twilight-fest), MTV is the epitome of what is wrong with youth and the values they covet.

In this "me-me-me" culture, MTV does all it can to promote wrecklessness (this is the station thought made Johnny Knoxville and his Jackass buddies stars for 15 minutes)...I could go onto the rant about "Where's the music," but I'll save that for another day.

As a matter of fact, I think I may examine this station a little closer. So, for the time being, this is really just a "surface rant." I haven't dug deep enough here to prove my point. Maybe sometime in the near future I may watch a day of MTV and see what I learn. Will I learn about my parents' first sexual encounter (because Dr. Drew said I would if I watched his show)? And, if I did become knowledgeable about such a thing, would I tear off my ears and gouge out my eyes after I learned it?

FYI...No MTV in the most Magical Place on Earth...they know better...

Angry Old Man Rant #1

Please join me for an occasional series that will showcase the fact that I am becoming a crotchety old man as I head into my (God help me) late twenties (head into?...I'm already there...).

So, I'm driving down the road at 10:30 last night and an SUV pulls out in front of me.  Now, I had plenty of time to slow down, but it was obvious that he shouldn't have pulled out in front of me...there wasn't enough time for him to comfortably speed up.  Alright, but, whatever...road rage is not something this old man really experiences. 

I notice that he's got those two tv screens in his SUV.  Now, whenever I see those tv screens in the car, I always try to pull up close to them and see if I can figure out what they are watching that's so exciting that they can't get from Point A to Point B without watching a television in their car (in the olden days, people would drive 16 hours to Florida with only activity books that came with those nifty "magic pens" that made stuff appear on the page and music tapes of Raffi and they'd have a good time doing it, dagnammit!).  Now, up until this point, I had only seen these tv's so that they could be viewed by those in the backseat.

But, I pull up close to this guy and the tv screens are on the damn visors of the driver's and passenger's seat.  The front seats!  This guy's driving down the road with his visor down watching a frickin' video?

Driving...and watching tv at the same time!

Okay, well, (A) that's not exactly the safest thing to do, and (B) you really couldn't live without tv for ten minutes?  I mean when this guy pulled out in front of me, he was coming out of some neighborhood, and when I passed him, he was going into some neighborhood only three minutes down the road.  For those mere minutes, you had to have your tv turned on?

I can't imagine this is legal.  Is it?  A tv on your frickin' car visor?  I mean, really, isn't that just an accident waiting to happen?

...And that's why I'm becoming an angry old man...