There are some things that are really, really popular, and I just don’t enjoy them.

Howard Stern. I used to listen to Stern back in the early 1980’s, when he was on DC-101 and I was a teenager, and I thought he was a scream. When I rediscovered him in the late 1990’s, now doing syndicated shows, both of us had changed and I no longer found him entertaining or amusing. For the sake of the old me, I really, really wanted to like Howard Stern again, but his show lacked energy and there was only so long I could listen to a multi-millionaire kibitz with his dysfunctional friends and whine about his life and his job. For me, Stern had become boring and not at all funny. 

I haven’t heard Stern since his switch to satellite radio, and I’m fine with that.   

Hugh Hefner and Playboy. Playboy is a great magazine, so long as you get off on looking at naked Barbie dolls. My ideal of feminine beauty, however, is not fake blondes with fake boobs and fake tans. And while I’m certainly no prude, I find it really skeevy that a guy past 80 is gweeping bimbettes young enough to be his granddaughters. Because, apparently, women only half his age aren’t hot enough for him. “Dirty old man,” indeed. 

Maxim magazine. For its first few issues, Maxim was actually a men’s magazine with some brains to it—not a whole lot, admittedly, but at least scoring upper double digits on the IQ test. Apparently, the folks running Maxim decided—correctly, of course—that they could sell many more copies if they dumbed it down and added lots more photos of nearly-naked nymphettes. And so they did. And that’s about when I stopped buying it. 

Seinfeld. In the ‘90’s, I was too busy running around, working my butt off, and trying to keep my trainwreck of a life together: I had no time for TV. I did watch the final episode, though, and I wondered what all the fuss was about. 

Cheers. Ditto.

Something About Mary. Just not funny. Though Brett Favre showing up at the end was clever. Clever, but not funny. 

Monty Python. Silly. And not all that funny. And what funny bits there were (“It’s only a flesh wound!”) are no longer funny to me because they’ve been beaten to death by friends and relatives repeating them ad nauseum and then cackling like group-home residents (my apologies to those of you reading this on the group home’s PC). 

This is Spinal Tap. Ditto. And I don’t care if the knob goes up to 11.

A Fish Called Wanda. Again, not all that funny. But Jamie Lee Curtis was nice to look at.

Battlestar Galactica. I mean the dour, cable-TV version, not the cheesy, 1970’s Star Wars ripoff. As my wife and I watched the miniseries pilot, we wondered aloud just how bleak could the story get. Answer: pretty damn bleak. Like 19th-Century workhouse bleak. No, thank you. When the newly-appointed President abandoned thousands of people (including a little girl she just had a conversation with) to be slaughtered by Cylon robots, I knew this show, though gripping, was not for me. “What channel is ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ on?”

Firefly/Serenity. Meh. Looks and feels like “The Further Adventures of Han Solo” to me. And no, fanboys, the fact that Kaylee was cute does not do much to improve my opinion of it. 

Transformers. I don’t mean the 1980’s cartoon; I mean the 2007 live-action movie. Sure, Megan Fox was hot, and Shia LaBeouf was funny and goofy, but the whole thing was just too stupid for me. When I say “stupid,” I’m not even talking about the premise: giant robots from outer space have landed on Earth and can conceal themselves by transforming into common Earth vehicles, like cars, and trucks, and airplanes. No, I mean “stupid” like:

• If the robots can fly through outer space (the temperature of which is just above absolute zero, or -459 degrees F), why is it that cold (such as Arctic ice or even, as shown in the movie, hand-held fire extinguishers) can shut them down?
• If the robots can be shut down by cold, how does one of the evil robots move about on Mars, squashing an Earth probe? The average temperature of Mars is about -80 degrees F. Or did the robot just conveniently show up on a warm day, when the temperature got all the way up to 68 degrees F?
• Why do the evil robots attack a military base to hack into the Department of Defense network? There are easier, less dangerous, less noticeable ways to gain information, than, say, getting into a firefight with hundreds of soldiers.
• According to the film, Megatron, the leader of the evil robots, was found frozen in the Arctic by the U.S. government in the 1930’s. The government then moved Megatron from the Arctic to Nevada, while somehow still keeping the 35’ robot frozen using 1930’s refrigeration technology. Because if I had a 35’ tall, evil robot from outer space that I wanted to keep frozen, I’d move him from where he already was, where it’s cold year-round, to say, a desert, where the temperature gets well over 100 degrees in the summer. Because that makes all kinds of sense.
• After I’d moved my 35’ tall, evil robot from outer space (while still somehow keeping him frozen), I’d build the Hoover Dam over him, so that if he ever somehow thawed out and escaped, he could destroy the dam, endangering anyone who lived downstream, and disrupting power to millions of people in California, Nevada, and Arizona. Because that makes all kinds of sense.
• If I’m the military guys that survived the attack on the base, what I would do is lead the evil robots into a heavily-populated city, where the resulting battle could destroy scores of buildings and kill thousands of civilians. Because that makes all kinds of sense, you know.

Another problem with the movie is that it’s hard to tell most of the robots apart: with some exceptions, they all pretty much look the same. During the cityfight near the end, it’s hard to tell which robot is fighting which. Of course, by that point, I didn’t much care, anyway.

What if the original (1977) Star Wars film had introduced Darth Vader in the last third of the movie, and he only did anything at the climax? That would suck, right? Well, that’s exactly what happens with the main bad guy, Megatron, in Transformers. Although he’s mentioned a lot, and part of him is seen in a flashback, he only appears in the last third of the movie—and when he shows up, he’s frozen. He thaws out, of course, and finally gets some screen time, but it’s at the last battle in the movie. A big let-down.

I’m done venting for now. If you haven’t already read it, here are some more entertainment things that lots of people like, but I don’t….
 

Posted January 2008