I am serious... and don't call me Shirley!

About ten years ago I stopped giving a damn about popular music. Ever since then, when I pick up a copy of Billboard Magazine (which I used to review often), I'm lost and confused. Billboard has always been a music industry bible. Well, not exactly a bible, more like those tiny little comic books that the religious nutters hand out on Halloween when you expect to get candy. These days I have very little sense of who any of the current charted artists (or at least their songs) are.

Tonight, after the late night repeat of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I switched to MTV to see if I was missing anything else "hip." What I found was disturbing.

There is a program called Laguna Beach which is beneath contempt, yet I will comment anyway (because I've already started). I think it's a kind of reality show with rich kids from Sunny California. They just kind of wander around saying nothing and doing nothing. I don't know why they have their own show, or if anybody watches it, but there it was - on TV.

Now I realize this may prove that I am way past it, but I have a hard time understanding why this program is in its SECOND SEASON!! I could only stand about five minutes of the show before I had to switch to an infomercial, but I was subject to the work "like" about 375 times!

"So Kristen, do you like like like the like like like like?"

"Oh my like God, LC, I like like don't like like like the like like like like!"

"Okay, like then like let's like invite some like boys over for like a pool party like!"

Arrrrrrrrrghhhhhhh! Now I like need a drink to kill some suffering brain cells!

When I was younger, the word "like" was rampant, but not to the degree it is on Laguna Beach. I've stopped paying attention to anyone under the age of 18 because I can't handle the babble-talk, but I've noticed that "like" is becoming more and more prevalent in the lexicon of the youth. I'm willing to bet that within the next decade, "like" will be the only word in the language of the young, with only inflection and hand gestures defining the subtle differences in usage.

If you thought jive was difficult to keep up with, just listen to a teenage conversation for a few minutes. Be warned fellow curmudgeons, it's a secret code they're developing to drive us all nuts!