Animals
Barb Taub may be best known as the chronicler of Peri the Therapist With Paws, an Australian Shepherd dog, but she also lives with a pair of fluffy, lazy cats. She has finally yielded to the temptation to create comical cat videos. Choking hazard: Swallow food or coffee before clicking "play."
Beth Ann Chiles determines that, although these very tame goats enjoy being petted and talked to, they don't actually take an interest in being read to. Goats, like cats and dogs, aren't altogether "dumb" animals but my guess would be that, if they were trying to understand actual words, they wouldn't want to be confused by having a fictional story read to them. But the farm that advertised "Read to a Goat Day" certainly thought of a clever marketing scheme, as well as a way to get people to post very silly selfies like the video at the end of this post.
And we just can't leave out the Dogs.
Relationship Advice, Ridiculous
I don't know whether young people are unhappy because they are "lonely." I don't know whether they're unhappy at all. If they are I don't know whether promoting their parents to grandparenthood would help them; I suspect they're unhappy because socialism, to whatever degree it's been practiced, has destroyed their economic prospects, and they're depressed (if they are) because they're reacting to drugs and chemical contaminants, and a significant minority of them are claiming not to have hormone reactions to the opposite sex because they're living in overcrowded conditions. What I do know, and know ull well, is that if people are taking antidepressants and thinking about suicide, they should not be thinking about marriage and children.
I will say, however, that for those (male or female) who live in small towns and don't want to be on the jury when somebody's relative is on trial, volunteering for jury duty in a specific case is a good way to get yourself, according to Virginia law, "forever barred" from jury duty.
Songs, Relative Badness Of
Person has a point. (To make that meme postable under the terms of our contract, let's understand that the last line was truncated and is meant to be "Your music just sucks all the pleasure out of listening to music ssshhhlllooop!" And Nicki Minaj's song is a sensitive historical portrayal of the feelings of an old-time slave, fourteen years old and always hungry, ordered, "You take that hoe and grabble some new potatoes for dinner, but don't you touch none o' MY berries! You just keep singing so's we can tell you ain't eating any berries!" Right.)
But, seriously? Lame-brained, repetitious song lyrics are nothing new. In fact, they're common to primitive cultures where little or no writing was done and much, if not all, of traditional songs sounds like "La la la." or, if they wanted a little more mental stimulation, "Hey yo, hey yo, hey yunno-wunno, hey nay yo." Or, if the idea is to focus on the tune and harmony, "Amen."
Is Handel's "Amen" chorus from The Messiah a stereo vampire? I don't think. Really bad songs have to have not merely repetitious lyrics but deeply bad lyrics.
Thanks to the sound quality of a monaural radio loosely mounted on the wall of an old rattletrap school bus, I remember some songs that I recognized as silly, but didn't hear clearly enough to realize how profoundly bad they were. It is possible that some baby-boomers failed to recognize the awfulness of some of our music due to fading transistor radio batteries. So often, even the good songs sounded so bad that it was easy to overlook what made the other songs so cringeworthy. YouTube has preserved deeply bad songs of every decade in a format that allows the web surfer to experience their full awfulness.
While alone, on an empty stomach, the intrepid reader may want to reconsider...
The endorsement of obnoxious behavior in
The morbid, guilt-ridden grief in
The self-destructive recklessness in
I would never suggest that millennial pop music is as good as the best of the 1960s and 1970s or, for that matter, even the 1950s. Taylor Swift's following Joan Baez's steps to commercial success only calls attention to the fact that she's no Joan Baez. No Maybelle Carter, no Jeanette Macdonald, no Kate Smith, no Judy Collins, no Stevie Nicks, nor yet any Madonna Ceccone, either. Still, is anyone seriously claiming that any of her songs is as bad as the three above?
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