Joe Strummer’s dead and I’m sitting in Nebraska without a car. It’s exactly like being 15 again, only without Joe Strummer alive. Does this suck.

Just when you thought MTV couldn’t get any more tired, pointless and dull, they announce plans to play even fewer videos more often. Then again, do you know anyone still watching MTV if they can get M2? Nope, didn’t think so. (Confidential to JK and FM: Look, kids, a common enemy. You do have them you know.)

*sigh* And I so needed things to be quiet over the holidays. Once again, I have been foiled by AOL and their dreams of world domination. They’re claiming now that they invented instant messaging, which is bound to come as a rotten shock to the legions of IRC users predating the Reston menace.

As if the Lott thing isn’t schadenfreuderiffic enough, one of those bring-the-Apocalypse Vertu phones has gone missing. I hope its owner, who blows exhaust fumes into the air for a living (without the salutory side effects of, say, long-haul trucking), has learned something from this experience. Actually, I hope jackals set upon him, but it’s only Monday and I’ve got two more days of brainless consumerism between me and the Amtrak platform. So I must be nice. (Yeah, and it’s all pretty big talk coming from someone who only just figured out that her mobile phone has by any reasonable definition ceased to work. But you know what? Not only did it not cost $20K, neither will my next one. Ptui.)

Morgan Stanley’s beating on the unions, look. Wait ’til they get a load of the (probable) transit strike here in NYC come Monday. (Of course, Morgan Stanley capitalists don’t interact with mass transit. They will, however, be darn confused when the help doesn’t show up for work and they have to rely on their own wits to tell their collective ass from a hole in the ground.)

Show And Tell Hour: Darrin’s adventures in retail management continue apace (dude, where’s my razor?), while I am somehow skeptical when confronted with someone else’s phonecam. And now if you’ll excuse me, I conducted a 4.5-hour interview today, and the only reason I’m not yet curled up in a larval ball is that I’m too tired to contract the necessary muscles. I will now make coffee in order to wake up enough to go to sleep. (The sad part is that this works. Every time.)

Of all the way-cooler than-I people to whom I owe an embarassing amount of email, Mike Godwin’s probably the nicest. He’s got a nifty essay out about digital television, well worth your time even if you don’t yet know why you should care.

Arminda informs me that on the strength of Monday’s Boondocks, Aaron McGruder is so my boyfriend. I’ve met the guy and trust me, he is going to have major freakin’ issues with this news. And while you meditate on that, read the strip already.

Mother of God, how’s this for a moment of clarity: The LA Times admits that most journalists these days know dick-point-all about the working class and poor, because they are neither. Amen, brother. There’s a certain hush I’ve only heard twice in my working life: when I told an editor that my mom works at Wal*Mart and likes it there fine, and when I told another editor that a friend of mine was in jail for killing some guy. I assure you it was exactly the same silence, quite the same. No difference at all. (pause for more reading) And aw jeez. Bella Stumbo’s outta here. I’m sitting here trying hard to think if I’ve met a journalist I respect who didn’t like her work. This is a loss. Wish she’d finished that memoir.

And now we know why I hate dogs: They’re SUCKUPS.