Nothing
by Matt Worley

I've got nothing to say this week.

Of course, that's probably not a good way to start out a column. But it was one of those crappy weeks. A rerun week. Every story that has been hot for the last month and a half died this week. There's no war. There's nothing new about sexy interns. The anthrax scare was a hoax. Nobody cares about the Grammies. Everyone agrees the Wu-Tang Clan should have won, but Dirty Ol' Bastard probably should have kept his mouth shut and let the rest of us bitch.

Maybe my attention span has exceeded safe limits. I feel as if the verdict is in on all of these stories and we should just let them lie. Iraq proved they didn't want to get blown up, and the threat of force works better than cutting off an allowance. This is a good lesson for parents who are wondering what to do about their kid who seems intent on making gang-banging a career, but what do the rest of us do? I was all set to go to war. No matter how much I don't like the idea of killing people, I'd resigned myself to the fact that the U.S. was gonna play Goliath to a bunch of people who don't know how to shoot a sling shot. It's kinda sick, but I certainly didn't want to be shocked when the bombs started falling.

There have been more speculations and mud-slinging in what MSNBC keeps calling the Crisis In The White House. I can applaud Keith Olbermann for bringing on a boxing commentator to talk about the scandal along with the regular talking heads of this "crisis," but didn't we all know the boxing guy was gonna say "I don't care"? And the rest of us have gone over this argument so much, we don't even flinch when we hear of "strategic leaks" to test public opinion. There's nothing new and most of us got past this kind of high school locker room talk in college.

"Jamie Sumners gave Derek Tally head on the band bus on the way back from the Amarillo game."

"Derek's going out with the head cheerleader--y'know Tamara Jenkins."

"There's Tamara and Derek. I wonder if she knows."

And after a while it doesn't matter if she knows or not. The rumor is larger than the truth and there is nothing that can change this. So maybe Jamie did give Derek oral pleasure on the band bus. About two seats over Sarah Smiles was doing the same thing to the lead saxophone player. When kids spend that much time blowing horns, you know something strange is going to happen.

So what are we all busy with these days? The same old thing.

I've got an interview to do with a mostly unknown band for the paper on Monday. There's a show on Wednesday (and hopefully my name will be on the list this time). It might snow, it might rain.

The Oscars are coming up. If Titanic doesn't win, there will be a lot of mad people around the world. I won't be one of them, but that doesn't matter so much as the story about how fans of the Titanic movie were "devastated" when their "favorite movie of all time" lost to Good Will Hunting for Best Picture.

I remember the first time I really cared about the Oscars was the year E.T. was up for best picture. I thought E.T. was the best movie since Star Wars and didn't understand why a boring picture about a boring person like Ghandi won. I still don't like Ghandi (the movie), but I haven't seen E.T. in about seven years or so either.

But this won't be a problem this year. Titanic, like Forest Gump before it, will take the prize--not only because it's made a lot a lot a lot of money, but also because it tugs the right strings. And there's no anti-Titanic movie out there. No Pulp Fiction to polarize the voting audience.

None of this matters. Not because it actually doesn't matter to a lot of people out there in the world, but because this is a week of reruns. The stories this week are only shadows of past glories or previews of newer and brighter ones.

Imagine my initial delight to seeing Sarah Michelle Gellar staring from the cover of Entertainment Weekly, only to find out the story she was shilling was about how the WB is suddenly an up and coming television network. A story I'd already heard from people I already knew.

Matt Worley is a little depressed. He'll feel better when the drugs kick in.

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