The Big Ass Update

My father and my grandmother-in-law are in rehab. It's not the Whitney & Bobby kind of rehab though. My grandmother-in-law fractured her hip about 2 weeks ago. She'll be rehabbing for most of the month. My dad had knee replacement surgery. The morning of his surgery it was almost cancelled because of a bout with kidney stones. He muddled through though. After a few days of recuperation, Dad was moved to rehab. He had one full day of rehab and then woke up the next morning with heart problems. The doctors ruled out minor heart attack and blood clot and chalked it up to a rise in blood pressure brought on by post-surgery, rehab pain. He will be coming home on Saturday despite only having four full days of rehab. I hope it's enough for him to easily regain full use of his knee in a reasonable amount of time. Both of them are doing well despite their situations.

I wrote about the show Cheap Seats a while back. I wanted to update that by saying that the new season has improved. They still have the studio audience, but the audience audio is silenced during the actual sports clips. That has made all the difference.

In another TV update, Wide Open Country isn't as great as I had hoped. There's usually only one or two videos per episode that I enjoy and I have usually seen them before. By the way, has there ever been a music format that had its popularity burn out so unceremoniously as the video? The channels that made their mark by airing videos have long since abandoned the format. I've heard rumors of MTV and VH1 still showing music videos, but I haven't seen them. I've seen overweight "celebrities" bitch and moan while they try to shed the pounds. I've seen teenagers with remarkably limited vocabularies rifle through the clutter and filth in rooms belonging to three other teenagers of the opposite gender in order to determine which one of the sequestered individuals he or she would like to go out with based solely on the style, cleanliness, and kink of a strangers' bedroom. But I haven't seen a video on these two channels in forever. Granted, I'm not seeking them out either. I'm not saying the diminished popularity of the music video is a bad thing necessarily. I also know what I'm saying isn't a unique or new observation either. I'm just wondering how something that seemed so essential to pop music for about 15 years has practically vanished and has most certainly lost most, if not all, of its importance.

Here's an article on the use of pop songs in advertisements. I have had discussions with a lot of my friends about the very same things mentioned in the article.