Oops. I forgot to link to the online discussion. Here it is. There are many fine contenders for awfulness. The Reliant Robin still gets my vote.

Over on Quora, there’s a fun discussion about worst-designed products ever. It’s well worth reading, and voting on. Representative nominees:

• the infamous butterfly ballot that bequeathed the George W. Bush “presidency” to us (which itself was very badly designed)
• the sort of plastic clamshell packaging that requires garden shears to open
• the obviously un-ergonomic Apple puck mouse with the too-short cord
  
• with special honorable mention going to this squirt gun, for obvious reasons

  

But bar none, the worst design has to go to the  Reliant Robin, an English car that we are very very lucky never made its way to Los Angeles. Forget earthquakes, riots, gang wars, and the state budget deficit, the Reliant Robin would be the one disaster LA would have no chance to overcome.

Poly Styrene, the great and influential lead singer of X-Ray Spex, died yesterday at the age of 53.

This brief excerpt from the documentary “The Punk Years” reminds us why she was important, as a feminist pioneer for punks, and as someone predicting the forthcoming clash between consumerism and conservation.

And this shows her fronting her flat-out great band on a great song. I’m sad knowing she’s gone, but I’m glad we have this.

At age 13, Rebecca Black is a talented young girl trapped between enormous sudden fame and instant lasting ridicule. You wouldn’t think that someone who has received 120 million views of her video on YouTube, and who recently performed her song “Friday” on “The Tonight Show,” and who has done all this without the benefit of a major label or close industry connections, needs anyone to come to her defense, but I’m going to do it anyway.

First, here’s her video. If, somehow, you haven’t already seen this, you’re going to want to watch it as a point of reference. And if you ever can’t find it again, simply go to YouTube, consistently one of the five most visited websites on the planet, and start to enter Rebecca Black’s name into the search field. Here’s how far you’ll get before YouTube suggests the correct response:  one letter. That’s right, you’ll get as far as “R” before it suggests “Rebecca Black Friday.” Before “Rihanna,” “rad,” or anything else you might think would come up first. Try the same thing with Google and you get the same result:  one letter, and it’s “Rebecca Black.” Lady Gaga is just damn glad that her name doesn’t start with “r.”

Now please take a couple of minutes and pay witness to the source of her fame. Here goes.

Now that you have watched that, it’s done to you what it did to me last week: It has nested in your head, where it will stay for days on end, no matter how you try to get it out or subsume it with other, more widely respected music. Are the lyrics “good”? No. But they don’t compare badly with those of some other songs. To wit:

I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name,
It felt good to be out of the rain.
In the desert you can remember your name,
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain.
La, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la
La, la, la la la la, la la la, la, la

I think that that compares rather unfavorably with Rebecca Black’s lyrics:

It’s Friday, Friday
Gotta get down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend
Friday, Friday
Gettin’ down on Friday
Everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend

The 13-year-old Miss Black’s lyrics express an emotion that many of us can relate to (which I will characterize as “Hooray, it’s Friday!”), and she does so in a way we can understand. Meanwhile, the grown man who wrote America’s “A Horse With No Name” tells us that he “met a fly with a buzz” and that “the heat was hot.” I have to think that while he was in this desert, he was ingesting mescaline.

Here is another set of lyrics which you may also recognize, also written by a grown man, one who has had a rather noteworthy career:

When I’m ridin’ round the world
And I’m doin’ this and I’m signing that
And I’m tryin’ to make some girl
Who tells me baby better come back later next week
‘Cause you see I’m on a losing streak
I can’t get no, oh no, no, no
Hey hey hey, that’s what I say

Under scrutiny, I don’t think that the lyrics of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” are any better than those of Rebecca Black. It’s a short slope, after all, from “I can’t get no, oh no, no, no
Hey hey hey, that’s what I say” to “we so awesome.” Lyrics aren’t the point, as proved so unerringly by David Byrne, whose lyrics both with and without Talking Heads serve to connote a feeling (usually anxiety and alienation) rather than denote an argument. The point of a song is the song, and lyrics are just a part of that. Not convinced? Try reading pseudo-poet Jim Morrison’s scribblings in service of The Doors; divorced from the instrumentation, they are unbearable.

While my daughter, who is only a couple months separated in age from Rebecca Black, and is thus a generational peer, will have none of this, and throws her hands over her ears whenever I play this Rebecca Black song, I know the song is every bit as infectious as “The Macarena,” which I have not heard once in 15 years and which I’ve nevertheless been unable to plunge from my consciousness. “Friday” also does not seem to me far removed from Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine,” which was regarded then and now fondly, and which is no less puerile. So I have to think that what we’re looking at here is age discrimination. Part of me is just glad that, for once, it’s directed at the too-young rather than the too-old.

Will Rebecca Black last? I rather doubt it, but who knows? One measurement of success is parody. “Weird Al” may not have gone after her yet (although he’s already set his sites on the Gaga; watch for the video, coming soon), but this fellow has, and thereby further proves her credibility.

This is the new video from Devo. You would think that if there were one 80’s music act that was going to sound dated 20+ years later, it would be Devo. (And, okay, Howard Jones.) But this song, released last June, sounds remarkably fresh, and this video proves their continuing embrace of new things. This video is interactive: It’s shot in 360, meaning that you can scroll left or right or up or down with your mouse to direct how the video moves, and links at the bottom allow you to click and buy related items immediately. That’s all great — and so is the song. I had the great good fortune to see Devo last year on this tour, and they were terrific. For more information on the making the video, click here, but after you watch the video.

Remember: Just because it’s cute, and it was free, that doesn’t mean you really want it.

A new report from Greenpeace alleges that cloud computing and internet use are sucking up energy and spilling CO2 into the atmosphere, with an impact greater than that of Russia. Here’s the story.

This is not the first time I’ve been accused of emitting toxic language, and it certainly won’t be the last.  But are those of us on the internet really doing worse than our predecessors (or younger selves), who relied on printing and mailing, or processing photographs with chemicals, or driving around to do shopping, or physically attending events? Isn’t it better to be sitting online doing these things rather than crawling around in traffic? Or should we all just hang ourselves?

Two or three times a year, I get called upon to judge theatre competitions of varying sorts. This year, I’m one of the readers for the PEN USA literary awards, which is always an honor. And this Saturday evening, I’m a judge of this playwriting and performance event at the Secret Rose Theatre. It sounds like a lot of fun. If you’re around, stop by.

I have mixed feelings about contests, awards, and prizes. In grad school, one of my playwriting professors, Jerome Lawrence,  told me he was against writing contests because it pitted writers against writers. I understood his point of view (and that’s an indication of just what sort of a guy Jerry was:  generous beyond measure), especially as someone who at that time had already been on both sides of prize-winning — winning one when I wasn’t sure my play was the best, and losing the same contest the next year when I was sure mine was. Especially when there’s a performance element in judging  a playwriting contest, a lot rides on elements outside the playwright’s control:  How responsive was the audience on the judging night, how “on” were the performers, was it too cold or too hot in the theatre, how was traffic on the way there, was the box office friendly or surly, and so forth.

At the same time, believe me when I say I understand the marketing value of winning any contest or award (and, sometimes, the prize value). I don’t care which movies have won which awards, believe me (especially when  it’s a system that awards “Best Picture” to “Avatar”). But do awards build careers, and would I put the full thrust of marketing and PR behind any awards won? You bet.

There is a story — and I don’t know how reliable it is — that, 40 years ago, the Nobel committee was deadlocked between giving the award for literature to either Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco. Finally, after much deliberation, one of the Ionesco champions who felt that Ionesco’s work had a broader scope than Beckett’s (and there may be something to that), switched sides to end the deadlock. And so:  Samuel Beckett won the Nobel, and Eugene Ionesco never did. Is the work of Beckett, the Nobel-prize-winning writer, better than that of Ionesco? Beckett has become far more deeply rooted in the cultural consciousness — referenced in “The Simpsons,” name-checked on “Quantum Leap,” parodied on Sesame Street — and a lot of that came from winning the Nobel.

Curious about the religious inclinations of comic-book characters? Wondering who shares your worship? This site helps demystify who belongs to which church. In retrospect, it makes sense that Two-Face, as someone obsessed with duality, is a Taoist, but I can’t quite reconcile the Hulk as a lapsed Catholic. (By now, he must have a lot of guilt to carry around.)

As I tell my daughter: Don’t, like, add qualifiers like, um, like, and don’t end declarative sentences with question marks?