It'd Be Funny If It Weren't True - Double True
2006-01-31, 16:30

Nauseous is the only word I can apply to the feeling I had while driving into work Friday morning and catching this Marketplace Morning Report feature. If you've a stout constitution, give it a listen.

In a nutshell, the report revolves around the veritable masterwork from Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg that is 'Lazy Sunday', a.k.a. the ChronicWHATcles of Narnia Rap. If you're not familiar, then dude, you're more out-of-touch than I am, and that's saying something. Click the link, man, for god's sake!

There, now that you've used up ten minutes of your time listening/watching online media, I'll move on. The report plays like a Daily Show interview; only everyone's serious, including the 'journalist' (I can only hope that his tongue was actually in his cheek and he just did a bad job of letting the listener - or me, at least - know) doing the report. They spend their time hacking open the video as if they were eighth-graders hovering over a dead frog in Biology class. It's disturbing that these people's first thought after seeing it was, "Who paid them to say that?" and assuming that they, in fact, had been. The idea that Parnell and Samberg were just referring to pop culture fixtures that surround their daily lives never really sounded like a viable alternative. The report ended with something of a 'we may never know' tone. And just imagine if it'd been received negatively - the flurry of lawsuits against NBC might have caused a tornado right in the middle of Rockefeller Center.

And then the 'Mr. Pibb/Red Vines Snak Pak' (because all things of this nature must be misspelled in order to be kewl) idea - followed by the enthusiasm from the Marketing F**k - was the thing that, for me, sent me into full-on nausea. Has our country become so Capitalist that the first reaction to even such a little fun thing like the CoN Rap is, "How can we make beaucoup bucks off of this?" One of the companies involved even went so far as to 'not comment', leaving open the option to the listener that they might really have had anything to do with the creative work. Blech.

To top of this day, full of irony, Coretta Scott King, the wife of one of America's greatest leaders in the fight for civil rights, died today, the same day that Sam Alito gets sent up to the Majors. Does the light dim, or does the darkness encroach?

-- End Transmission --