Introducing the 2011 Vergognoso

There's something to be said for the rough frontier justice of the marketplace. Old names like Packard and Studebaker are remembered fondly because when their time had passed they simply withered and fell. Not like Chevrolet, now under the oxygen tent with needles in its arm and tubes up its nose. Lean in close and you can hear the feeble wheeze: “Let me die.” Worse yet is the unspeakable prospect of an unnatural coupling between Chrysler and Fiat, the offspring no doubt an uncomfortable and clumsy sedan that won't start in the rain, for which no parts are available.

Perturbations of the aether

I live close enough to campus to listen to low power college radio. That means I get to hear music that a global hierarchy of broadcast professionals has decided is not worth hearing. Well, even experts can be right sometimes. Like if you listen to an indy rock song and after the first 5 minutes you think to yourself, “Wow. They really really know this chord.” Or maybe you'll hear something that if a musician heard it they'd say it was poetry, but a poet would define it as music. That's human nature. Blame it on the other guy.

They're so cute when they're feisty.

I'm tired of hearing about it. Guys my age, musicians, are griping about how there's no decent gigs any more because they all go to these kids, incompetent posers who'll play practically for free. Rave on, Pops. No mention of the fact that any surviving members of your long ago fan base are all snug in bed right after Rachel Maddow instead of packing the clubs like they used to. Just wait a generation; maybe then some kids young enough to be your grandchildren will rediscover you, and you can do a feeble campus tour. Possibly drop dead in Denmark.

Played by horns in pedal tones.

India's Tata rolls out the Nano. On its surface, this is simply a statement of fact: the Nano is the world's cheapest car- it costs less than two grand brand new. It looks like a toaster on a roller skate. Probably a lot of Americans will be buying them as spare transportation to get back to the clubhouse if their golfcarts break down. Heck, you could carry one in your backpack in case your legs get tired. But that's not the best part. The best part is the euphonious sentence, “India's Tata rolls out the Nano.” It's pure music.

Walter Brennan as Dorian Gray

It's even worse than we thought. Such benchmarks of mental acuity as reasoning, speed of thought, and spatial visualization all max out around age 22, and then start decaying by the time you turn 27. Professor Timothy Salthouse of Virginia University said so. The BBC published it. And I have no evidence to refute it. That explains the giant accounting error my generation seems to have made. We thought we were spending our children's inheritance, but it turns out it was our own retirement fund. Oops. Some bad math, I guess, back when we were befuddled geezers in our mid-30s.

Enjoy my crusty exterior

I have in front of me the bag from a loaf of bread. Not just ordinary bread- “authentic artisan bread.” And this bag is crowded with type, marketeering blather promising that each loaf is “gently shaped” before baking, directing me to enjoy it, and warning that it may contain wheat. Further down, there's a whole paragraph under the heading “sandwich assembly.” In case you bought this loaf of bread but don't know how it works. It's somebody's job to cover these bread bags with words; a certain percentage of absolute drivel is inevitable. I know the feeling.

Hey hey we're the Monkees.

There's near consensus among political theater critics, whose specialty is telling us what people in Washington think of what people in Washington think, that Bobby Jindal isn't quite ready for his closeup. The RNC must be tearing its collective (graying) hair out by the roots. By their lights, they've done everything the electorate asked. They courted Hillary Clinton's base with a small-state governor with a cervix. They rebutted Obama with a small state governor with a cafe au lait epidermis. If FDR came back, they'd roll out some guy in a wheelchair. This sort of thinking produced the AMC Gremlin.