MTV is in trouble

Broadcasts from Babylon

(No Cover Magazine, July 2002)

by Robert Welborn

MTV is finally in Trouble again…

Remember back when we were young and MTV was the bane of our cable companies, Sunday school teachers and, if you’re young enough, our parents? Now MTV has finally come up with a concept for a show that might even offend the acerbic, violence-desensitized MTV generation. Harassment (the pronunciation has not been finalized) is the new “guerilla-style Candid Camera” with host Ashton Kutcher of Dude Where’s My Car acclaim (perhaps “acclaim” is the wrong word, but I don’t want to dilute the use of the “infamy”). In a recent prank, they placed what appeared to be a mutilated corpse in a hotel room. When James and Laurie Ann Ryan, of Washington , D.C. (a place where you’d think mutilated corpses were a common sight), entered the room they found the body and tried to run screaming from the abattoir. Of course the prank then begins, guards show up, a paramedic, people blame them for the execution style slaying of the body. The $10 million compensatory damages sought by the Ryan’s obviously points to their level of amusement surrounding the prank. The show’s focus is on recording pranks played on people “older than the target demographic”, a group of people famous for suing no good punk kids.

When the same prank was played on Vince Neal formerly of Motley Crue, he said: “Dude, that dead guy is my room in like every city, and one time, I swear he was a dead hooker.”

R. Kelly, Welcome to Pee Wee’s Playhouse…

Sorry, Paul Rubens, your meteoric crash is no longer the loudest thud in the history of the entertainment industry. The sound of Circuit Judge Karla Wright gaveling R. Kelly out on $750,000 bail has replaced it. Mr. Kelly is alleged to have done the nasty na-na’s with a fourteen year old girl, recorded it and then distributed said recording to his friends. The Grammy award winner was ordered not to leave Florida , to have weekly “check-ins” with state authorities, and, in the loudest thud, to avoid all contact with any unrelated minors. When you are not allowed to even bump into humans under the age of 18 and your entire way of life is focused on trying to impress teenagers, you’re like way screwed.

This little tidbit for you philosophy majors out there: R. Kelly’s Lawyer has said that the tape is a fake and the girl in the tape is not a minor (thus violating the law of non-contradiction as posited by the stoic movement, which was of course first posited false by Hegel and most recently by Peirce’s pragmatists). Peirce argued that truth is whatever the majority perceives it to be. This was boon for those pushing democracy as a form of government, but has proven to be rather painful for R. Kelly, since everyone thinks he’s a total pederast now.

Hey! Ho! Let’s Go

Dee Dee Ramone is gone. Dee Dee was a singer, bass player and songwriter for The Ramones. Mr. Ramone (real name Douglass Colvin) died of an apparent accidental drug overdose. He briefly lived as rapper, which I guess I have to add as a footnote to this eulogy, but did you hear any of his hip-hop? Let’s just forget that part, and remember that he was an author and a co-founder of the band. For those of you who recently evolved from troglodytes, the Ramone’s:

a) started in Queens , NY ,

b) got their name from Paul McCartney’s pseudonym, Paul Ramon,

c) started the punk rock revolution in the UK a year before the Sex Pistols and the Clash

d) all of the above

Underground Las Vegas bookies are starting to traffic: Right now Bob Hope and Cloris Leachman are scoring lower in the dead pool than The Ramones.

The King is dead?

Re-mixes will be the end of us. The longstanding feud between Elvis Presley and The Beatles for the billboard records of jolly old England has rekindled again. The Beatles are currently tied with the King for most number one hits on UK singles billboard, but the tie breaker is coming up. JXL, the Dutch answer to Moby (as if the Dutch needed an answer), spun up a dance remix of an obscure Elvis song “A Little Less Conversation”. The single is fast moving up the chart and will likely hit number one sometime this month. “A Little Less Conversation” is song from one of the King’s late 60’s films Live a Little, Love a Lot,(which I’m sure you haven’t seen, so here’s what IMDB.com says about it: “Greg Nolan meets Bernice, and loses both his job and his apartment. However, Bernice manages to get him a new apartment, but it is so expensive that he has to get two full-time jobs. Nolan has trouble finding time to do both jobs.”)

Beatles Fans across the UK have gathered and issued the following statement: This is all Yoko Ono’s fault. Elvis is everywhere, there’s a little bit of Elvis in everyone. He’s even in Joan Rivers, but he’s trying to get out—man.

What do you do with 10,500 hits of X?

Joshua McCready, younger brother of country siren Mindy McCready, is going to spend some time in Oz. Joshua, 21 and formerly the ward of Mindy, was caught with a friend outside of Nashville in possession of 10,500 Ecstasy pills. Three questions:

a) Is someone is taking their recreational drugs a bit too seriously?

b) Who had to count the pills, and was there any prize for guessing the number, like say, a pillow made out of X?

c) What kind of party do you through with 10,500 Ecstasy hits? Answer: a really big one

A Nashville judge has ordered McCready to spend 50 months in a Federal prison. You know, a FEDERAL prison, where they keep the people so bad the states don’t even want to deal with them, and it’s in The South.

Joshua McCready, Welcome to New Sodom : Congratulations, you’re a 21-year-old boy that looks like a country music star that half of these guys would actually kill someone to see naked. This particular ring of hell offers smoking and non-smoking, however.

Who grows a fourth leg while on tour?

Who is adding a fourth leg to their US tour. No really Who is. I swear. “What?” you ask, and I say “No, Who”. “I don’t know” you say. Then I say “third base”, then I laugh a whole bunch and ask you if you pronounce Pete Townshend’s name “Town-send” or “Town-shend”. Did you know that the Townshend Act’s of the 1760’s almost started the American Revolution 10 years earlier? Oh, by the way, this whole thing is about the band The Who announcing that they will be going to St. Paul , Green Bay , and Toronto . To which you are supposed to say “Those guys must be getting hungry if they are touring such depressing little burgs”.

In case you missed this one: The Who are part of the rock god pantheon, were part of the British Invasion and started the Mod movement. Abbot and Costello were a Vaudeville stage act that got picked up in movies in the 30’s after doing a skit in New York aptly called “Who’s on First”. The Townshend Acts were a series of taxes levied on the American Colonies throughout the 1760’s in the form of import duties. Outrage on the part of the colonists and daft campaigning by none other than Benjamin Franklin led to their repeal of all but the tax on tea. If you have to explain a joke it’s not funny.

What would Sir Elton’s Porno name be?

Try this exercise; take the name of your second pet and the name of the street you grew up on. That’s your porno name. Mine would be Fritz Field. It’s not as fun as you would think. Oh, yeah, story. Elton John’s house in the south of France was used for a photo shoot of several female porn stars. Elton was apparently not home at the time. The girls apparently kept their clothes on at least during the shoot. The shoot was for a Vanity Fair article on porn. One of the young “ladies” stated that the house was beautiful and filled with a lot of very vivid male erotic art.

How to steer your pips at Skull and Bones onto to this little snifter: “Oh I’ve got a little vexation, what lives in Provence , is a member of the CBE and can shock a porn queen?”

Project management gone awry…

“Project Pat is not home right now, please call back in 2 to 4 years.” Memphis Based Project Pat of the Three 6 Mafia has been sentenced to 51 months of active incarceration then three years of supervised release due to his felonious possession of a firearm. The Project Management Institute was not immediately available for comment. I hear that he’s thinking how NRA membership doesn’t sound like that bad of an idea anymore. To add insult to perjury, a Jackson, Tennessee judge says he also owes $75,000 in fines and $200 in court costs (I wish court cases in California only cost $200). Project Pat was arrested during a traffic stop in January of 2001 when two revolvers where found in his vehicle during a random search.

So let’s get this straight: he is a black man, driving an expensive SUV in Tennessee, over the speed limit and the cops picked his vehicle for a “random” search. Hmm. Random. Statistical simulation methods may be contrasted to conventional numerical discretization methods, which typically are applied to ordinary or partial differential equations that describe some underlying physical or mathematical system. The model used by the Tennessee police is thus random, just constrained to a very limited solution set (i.e. African-Americans in nice SUV’s).

Archived Broadcasts from Babylon: December 1991

Billy Joel feels bad about ending “We Didn’t Start the Fire” with the so called “cola wars”. “How was I supposed to know that Berlin Wall would get torn down, that communism would fall, the cold war would end, grunge music would catch on and we’d fight what almost amounted to a 3^rd World War [that is the Gulf War] in the next three years.” He can be forgiven, as it seems history occurs almost every day and unlike our non-performing stock market no one can accurately predict it. Billy Joel is interested in adding a new verse to the song to cover some of the aforementioned events and re-releasing the song. He’d also like to add some of his predictions to the song. Below are list that he is toying around with and trying to get in rhyming tetrameter:

1. Jesus Jones will be the dominant force in music for the 90’s

2. George Bush will be the first President since Roosevelt to serve more than two terms, after they alter the constitution to allow him to do so.

3. Gregorian chant music will replace hip-hop with the youth of the nation.

4. This internet thing is like totally going to take off.

5. Jolt Cola will become the Tab of the Baby Busters (or as some have started calling them Generation X).

Historical Disclaimer: At least he was right about the Jesus Jones thing.