I just want to say that I’m not trying to be pretentious or overly intellectual with this.  It’s not my intention to make myself sound cooler than I am or intimidate anyone with my brilliant choices concerning television, literature, and film.  I am not that great.  For example, I don’t listen to NPR.  Like, ever.  Aside from a few episodes of This American Life, I find it to be even more boring than early morning DJs on 88.1 talking about record labels and studio engineers.  Which is to say, way boring.

I’m not a total idiot, though, because I can read and stuff, and I know big words.  Also, I get maybe 75% of XKCD.  But again, I’m no genius, and what I’m about to write is in no way intended to make me seem like one.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH MTV.

Is it just that I got older?  It has to be.  I used to love MTV.  I took any opportunity to watch MTV I could, and because I didn’t have cable, that meant hanging out at my grandparents’ place just to watch episode after episode of Daria.  I knew every single Real World cast up to and including (kind of, I’ve mostly forgotten everyone except the drunk girl who fell into the pool) Real World Hawaii.  I’m a fast reader so I adored Pop Up Video, and I would still really like to get drunk with Kurt Loder.

Somewhere along the line, MTV went from being a network that I could watch at pretty much any hour of the day to being a pox on the airwaves, something I dread catching even a glimpse of when I’m flipping past the 40s on my basic cable.  It may have had something to do with TRL, or, as I remember it, Total Request Live.  From what I understand, MTV was trying to get back to playing more, I don’t know, music, so they hired some bug-eyed guy who eventually banged Tara Reid.  The bug-eyed guy pretended like he didn’t notice the studio full of shrieking teenage girls, just like he pretended like his soul wasn’t dying every time he commented on the artistic merits of the latest N*Sync video.  (Carson Daly, you’re still a tool.)

Around the time TRL debuted, the rest of MTV’s programming went to shit.  Instead of trending towards music programming, the shows were now made for and starring the screaming TRL audience.  The Real World casts were better off dropped into a nuclear reactor and all the other shows, designed to engender sympathy or envy of whichever celebrity had to pay his mortgage that season, ended up unintentionally skewering whomever they featured because, hey, celebrities have a lot of money, but they’re idiots.  Every single one of them.  Even the Video Music Awards sucked.

(Point: there are no people on MTV anymore.  There are caricatures of people.  Please tell me they’re caricatures.  No person could behave like that.  I’m aware that I’m being very “kids today” and that I may as well be straight out of Pleasantville, but come on.)

Now, MTV is airing this show called The Jersey Shore.  (Or maybe it’s just “Jersey Shore?”  I kind of want to slap myself for even thinking about it.)  I’m confused by The Jersey Shore for a few reasons.  To begin, why is anyone – anyone at all – interested in New Jersey?  Also, what sort of promotional tool is this for anyone who is vaguely Italian by heritage?  Lastly, why on earth would anyone with any goddamn sense have loosed those idiots onto television?

And WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?

This is not a woman.  This is a troll with silly hair who, and seriously, I’m not joking around, I have the strongest urge to roll down the stairs.  Can you imagine coming home to your darkened house and have that thing spring out of the shadows at you?  She’s small but I bet she weighs 250 pounds.  You know how midgets are shorter but have the same body mass as a regularly-sized person?  I just look at this girl and think of a cannonball with limbs…also with a lower IQ than an inanimate object made of composite metals.

Based on what I’ve glimpsed in the supermarket checkout lane, her real name is Nicole.  Or Sarah.  Or Somefuckingthingoranother, I guess it really doesn’t matter.  Because her nickname is Snookie.  I saw on The Soup that she said her “girls” gave her the nickname in middle school, but since no one has “girls” in middle school (they have “friends,” get it right), I choose to believe that either MTV gave her the nickname or, like every other mouthbreathing troglodyte from Jersey, she really does believe she has connections to the mob and this is some kind of “professional” designation.  At least she doesn’t call herself Big Pussy.

I’d wanted to find The Soup video of that fat little golem getting rocked in the face by a roidy guido (a roidy schoolteacher guido, at that), but all I could dig up was the Huffington Post non-embeddable video on it.  Assholes.  Idiots get drunk and violent and you punish the rest of us?  Unfair.

But speaking of videos, Gawker’s collection is harmless, amusing, and fun because none of the videos runs for over 60 seconds.  Also the commentary is, like, mad educational.  You’re welcome.