I’ve been using Twitter. Hell, almost everyone’s been using Twitter. It’s easier than actual blogging, and it lets you keep your friends (and probably some strangers) updated on the goings-on of your life. Plus, there’s the fun, stupid challenge of it — how much information can you fit into the 140-character limit? It’s like writing a haiku, without all that lotus-blossom bullshit!

In addition to all of that, Twitter serves as an excellent repository for all the strange thoughts that zip through your head during the day. How many times have you thought, “I always assumed Scooby Snacks would taste kind of like beef jerky,” only to realize that none of your friends are around to be wowed by your epiphany? Why, by the time you see everyone, you’ll have forgotten all about this particular flash of genius! Sure, you could call someone, or even send a text message, but that only reaches one person. Twitter solves this dilemma by allowing you to send that thought to the internet, where your friends (and anyone else who stumbles upon your Twitter account) can read it.

For me, though, Twitter has helped me get past a rather unpleasant bit of my childhood. I spent a considerable portion of my youth in and around South Bend, Indiana, which may or may not be the most boring place on Earth. News of the outside world came to us in the form of a small-town paper. Admittedly, most of it was the same wire service crap you see in every other newspaper in the country, but we still had people covering the local news. And, like many small-town papers of its day, it had someone on staff whose sole purpose was to write observational humor.

Maybe you know him? Older fellow, probably wearing a bowtie in his photo, with a column called something like “As I See It” or “If You Ask Me” or, god forbid, “Musings.” Each week, the “Culture” section would play host to 15-20 of his ostensibly amusing observations about life. We’re talking really horrible confused-old-man bullshit here; lots of, “What the heck’s an e-mail?” and, “I remember when bread was a nickel and a car was a quarter,” and, “That waitress’s nose ring frightens me.”

He tried to include punchlines, of course, and turn his complaints into little jokes — “People had pierced noses when I was young, too, but we called them ‘fishing accidents’ and they didn’t cost $50.” And I, as a lad of perhaps thirteen years old, realized something:

I was funnier than this asshole.

I’m not an especially brilliant comedic talent, and I was even less so at age 13, but damn it, I was funnier than this asshole. Not only was I confident that I could have written a better column, I was pretty sure I was even more of a crotchety old man than he was, despite his 50-year head start. I have seen nothing in the years since this revelation to make me believe otherwise. Am I funny enough to be on TV? Probably not. Am I funnier than you? Matter of opinion. Am I funnier than the bowtie-wearing geezers that once polluted America’s local newspapers? You’re goddamn right I am. For fuck’s sake, I wrote that Scooby Snack joke back in the second paragraph, and that shit is gold!

There is simply no way I am alone in this experience. Surely thousands, perhaps millions of others have read the unfunny musings in their local paper and thought, “I could do this better,” and been completely correct.

Twitter gives us the chance to prove it. Each tweet we send out, be it about moronic coworkers, Nick at Nite, or a really epic sneeze, sends a message. We don’t need your cut-rate Andy Rooneys! We can observe life’s little absurdities our own damn selves! We are legion, we are reasonably entertaining, and this vegan-friendly chocolate pudding is fucking delicious!

Well, that, or we’ll all turn into crotchety old men ourselves, but at least we won’t have an editor breathing down our necks and telling us we can’t say “fuck.” So, still funnier.

Over the last few months, several of my friends have had some rather unkind words for the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer. I couldn’t see why they were so upset. I mean, teenage girls were reading! And not just reading, but swarming bookstores to get their hands on these 600-page monsters as quickly as possible. Could I really disapprove of that?

Yes. Yes I could.

The series tells the story of Bella Swan, a barely-defined teen cipher who moves to a small town in Washington and falls in love with Edward Cullen, a boy in her class who turns out to be a 100-odd-year-old vampire. And that’s… basically it. I mean, the author tries to sandwich a plot into each of the four books – the first concerns a rival group of vampires who come to town and stir shit up for no discernable reason – but for the most part, they’re just very long, flowery explanations of how wonderful it is to be hopelessly infatuated with a vampire.

Seriously, go read the plot summary of the first novel. Somehow, Meyer managed to stretch that out to over 500 pages. How, you wonder, did she work such magic? Simple: by padding out the text with endless swooning over the sheer prettiness of Edward Cullen (in a perfectly chaste way, of course). But so what, right? It’s a supernatural love story for teenagers, and teenagers are stupid and overdramatic when it comes to love*.

Well, it’d be great if it was that simple, but no. Instead, like Homer Simpson before her, Bella just gets dumber and dumber as the series progresses. The second book, New Moon relies entirely on an Idiot Plot, which the legendary Turkey City Lexicon defines thusly:

Idiot Plot

A plot which functions only because all the characters involved are idiots. They behave in a way that suits the author’s convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own. (Attr. James Blish)

Seriously, at one point, Edward finds out Bella’s dad is at a funeral. Instead of asking, you know, who actually died, he just assumes it was Bella and runs off to kill himself. And vampires (in this universe, anyway) are tough to kill. He has to go to fucking Italy to do it.

Let me drag this out a little more: Edward goes through all the trouble of traveling to Italy and meeting with some kind of vampiric Dr. Kevorkian, but never once stops and says, “Maybe I should’ve asked some follow-up questions about that funeral.”

And stupid protagonists aren’t even the worst part. No, that honor is reserved for the books’ romantic view of abusive relationships. Yeah, vampires? Apparently they’re very, very bad boyfriends. To call Edward jealous and controlling would be a tremendous disservice to all the jealous, controlling men who, though assholes, have never actually gnawed a fetus out of a woman’s abdomen. Seriously, that shit happens in the fourth book.

It’s not just the torso-nibbling (hey, even the best of us have our moments of weakness and/or bellybutton fetishism). Edward is the very model of an emotionally abusive boyfriend. He forbids Bella from seeing her friend Jacob because he’s a werewolf** — and probably because he’s a male as well, which makes him a threat to Edward’s dominance. He berates Bella, sends her away or walks out on her, and then comes back and apologizes and promises that things will be better from now on. Bella’s primary character traits are low self-esteem and hopeless devotion to this douchebag, to the point that she’s willing to become a vampire, leave her old life behind, get married at 18, and squeeze out a vampire-child that nearly kills her.

That brings me to another problem with these books: Stephenie Meyer doesn’t know shit about vampires, or how to write about them. Every vampire story uses a different set of “rules” for their undead characters. Can they go out in sunlight? Can they be driven off with garlic? Can they eat people-food, or are they on an all-blood diet? And so forth. Most authors try to select rules that provide a nice balance between the traditional vampire myths and the demands of the story they’re telling.

Meyer, not so much. She seems to have given some thought to how they avoid killing people (they subsist on animal blood), but beyond that her vampires’ powers seem limited to handsomeness and teen-soap-style brooding. As Bella’s pregnancy suggests, they can have babies, and those babies grow up into adult vampires. Which is to say, her vampires age. You know, just like people who fucking aren’t vampires.

Also, Stephenie, you aren’t supposed to turn your lead character into a vampire. When you do that, your story crosses the line between “forbidden love” and “together-forever bullshit wish fulfillment.” And then, just to make sure everybody gets their happy ending, you made Jacob the werewolf fall in love with a baby. Sure, he’s gonna wait until she’s 18, but dude. Dude.

Plus there’s a bunch of anti-abortion shit in the last book, which I’m not even gonna touch because my head is already close to exploding. Point is, millions of teenage girls (and their moms) are going crazy for these books. They’re falling in love with the controlling, womb-chomping vampire. They’re envying his dead-eyed, dependent human girlfriend. And most of all, they’re wishing they could have a love as pure and wonderful as Edward and Bella’s.

Now the first book has been turned into a movie, starring Cedric Diggory and Some Chick, and the die-hard fans are already gearing up for multiple viewings. If it makes enough money, sequels will become inevitable, and Harry Potter’s martyred friend will be forced to act like an abusive dick in front of everyone. I hope he enjoys acting off-Broadway, because he’s gonna need to do a lot of that to get his reputation back.

*“How can you break up with me? You said we’d be in love forever! You even wrote it on your binder!”

**Of course there are werewolves!

A little more than two months ago, I made a point to avoid watching MTV’s Video Music Awards. I had my reasons; MTV becomes less relevant every year, devotes undue attention to flavor-of-the-month mediocrity, and doesn’t fucking play music anymore. Worse than all of that, they’re now providing an outlet for acts once relegated to the Radio Disney gulag, confirming that, yes, pop music is for 8-year-olds.

In the days that followed the VMA broadcast, though, details of the event began seeping into the real news. Apparently, the host (noted entertainer Some Dude) had made some untoward remarks about the Jonas Brothers. Other performers had rushed to their defense, offering rebuttals that I’m sure were terribly witty in context. Numerous bloggers and commentators were up in arms about the implications of this whole affair. And I was forced to ask a very important question.

Who the fuck are the Jonas Brothers?

It is in the spirit of that noble inquiry, and all others like it, that I present our newest feature, Codger Corner, in which we will help our fellow geezers figure out what those damn kids are always talking about. Because by god, the world needs this. Not everyone likes watching E!, and even when you do watch it, those TV assholes just assume you know who they’re talking about.

My generation – and probably other generations, as well – is dealing with a hard truth: we are getting too old for this crap. The pop-culture universe keeps moving, and we’re struggling to keep up. When some amazing new band puts out a good album, we’ll be able to find it, but do we really have to pretend to care about Hannah Montana while we wait for that to happen? Hell, I thought Hannah Montana was a cartoon character until I saw those pictures of her dad expressing his boundary issues.

Thanks to us, you’ll never again need to worry about such nonsense. If one of these glorified birthday clowns starts doing something newsworthy, we’ll tell you who they are and give you some really mean shit to say about them the next time the subject comes up. You won’t just be informed; you’ll be the funny guy at the office! I mean, it would be nice if you could credit us, but we’re more interested in helping you. We’re like TMZ, except actually funny, and not written for an audience of semiliterate manicurists.

Oh, and the Jonas Brothers? According to Wikipedia, they’re a Disney Channel act made up of three actual brothers. All three are clean-living Evangelical homeschoolers who wear those fucking purity rings to advertise their dedication to waiting until marriage to have sex. If you need us to help you make fun of that, you are decidedly not part of our intended audience.