Release the robotic Richard Simmons

A Perfectly Cromulent Blog is my latest little 'stumble upon' Internet treasure. The blogger, a guy named Pete Van something or other, is a much better writer than I am, although he makes up for that by being outrageously (and usually hilariously) dead wrong on whatever subject he's blathering about, about a third to half of the time.

Still, even when I completely disagree with every single word I may be reading there at any given moment, I am nearly always vastly entertained regardless. Such is this fellow's talent with words that he can drive me from one emotional extreme to the other within a span of seconds, as with the following entry from July 10th of this year:

Two unrelated musical thoughts:

1. She Who Shall Not Be Named sometimes falls asleep in the car when I'm driving her home in the afternoon. To facilitate nap time, I'll occasionally switch to the easy listening station on Sirius (Movin EZ). Today, I caught Olivia Newton-John's "Please Mister Please," and I had occasion once again to thank the Great Old Ones I didn't spend my formative years in the 1970s. I don't know how anybody survived that shit.

I mean, I delude myself into thinking that - were I a '70s teen - I'd be really into the Stooges, Ramones, the Clash, and Big Star, but I know I'd be sporting the white boy afro and listening to Kansas and Styx in Peenman's Good Times Van, and I hate myself for it.

2. Also today, and possibly on the same station, I heard that John Mayer song "Waiting on the World to Change." With insipid lines like, "It's not that we don't care/We just know that the fight ain't fair" to justify his inaction, I was reminded Of that equally lame Jesus Jones song, "Right Here, Right Now."

You see what he's like? I mean, I was a 70's teen, and I'm reading through that and the whole first bullet point is, like, "Dude, that's so fucking HARSH". I mean, my fingers are itching for a chair to bust over his no doubt smarmy little grin as I take in THAT action. But then I get to Number 2, and, well, how can I stay mad at someone who feels EXACTLY the way I do about the self indulgent whiney gutless moral laziness embodied in the very title "Waiting For The World To Change"? I just can't. Although that whole "better writer than I am" thing really DOES piss me off, but, you know, that's just because I'm a very small and petty human being in some ways.

Anyway, the archives go back to 2003 and you can pick pretty much any entry at random and most likely find something that will either make you laugh, snarl, think hard... or, sometimes, all three at once, which is, admittedly, harder on the nervous system than many of you may be looking for.

The material there covers a vast range of subject matter, all of it pop culture derived in some way or another. Not all of it is anything I find appealing; when he writes about getting really really drunk, or playing hockey, or watching baseball, or local Houston politics, my eyes glaze over pretty fast and I'm moving the mouse pointer over to the scroll bar with style and panache. But when he's on about the STAR WARS prequels or shitty TV shows on cable or people saying mean things about Mr. Rogers or a lot of other shit I find vaguely interesting, well, he's a fun way to kill a few minutes at work when I'm probably supposed to be, you know, working.