--I don't think that there is a new buzzword that I've gotten sick of faster than the term "metrosexual." It showed up on the horizon about a month ago, and now it's everywhere. I first saw it when ESPN's repository of all things marginally sports related, Page2 did a whole big thing about manly-men vs. metrosexuals, and well, that was enough on the issue for me. Since then though, cable news stations have done stories, Gene Edward Veith wrote about it in World, and the other night I was flipping channels and that new lousy Alicia Silverstone show had her character dating a 'metro.' Enough already!
--Ok, I'm really sick of Bill O'Reilly and his show. The other night, he was having fits about Kill Bill and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with complaints about Ludacris thrown in for good measure. He basically thinks that they are corrupting America's youth, and that it's impossible for parents to keep their kids from seeing violent content (when I was growing up, the only violent content I saw was the evening news, and I don't think that it's really that much harder to keep violence away from kids today). However, he's criticizing the movies in question without having seen them, and insists that any critics which may have given them good reviews (I don't know of any that actually liked Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and don't intend to see it myself), are just eliteist and don't care about family values. When it was pointed out that violent entertainment isn't new, Shakespear is violent and Oedipus Rex is violent, he writes those off by saying that those are for adults--um, so are the movies he's complaing about, that's why thay have an R-rating, and besides, Oedipus would be pretty nasty if it were made into an accurate movie--the eye gouging scene made me physically nauseated just reading the play. But, that doesn't fit with his agenda. As for Ludacris, he's become O'Reilly's favorite whipping boy, but Bill is so out of touch with popular culture that he didn't even seem to find out that the guy exists until a few months ago.
--Speaking of the media being out of touch with culture, it's been in the last few months that the media has figured out that rappers have been doing the whole pimp persona, despite the fact that pimping has been a major theme for the past several years. And, only a few people have figured out that when rappers talk about being pimps, most of them are not necessarily talking about literal pimping of hookers, they are talking about the over-the-top, ladies man persona that they see exemplified in the pimp lifestyle. My sister and I've been using "pimp" in that (non-literal) sense for at least the past three years, so I was kind of suprised that it took that long for the media to catch on. (I picked up the term from two guys I worked with one summer who were both aspiring rappers and used it that way).
--That gives me an idea. Maybe the reason that most contemporary Christian music is something like three years behind everybody else is because they get their idea about what's 'in' in music from mainstream media sources.