My next piece about the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards is up at Alpha Mom:

I do not know how to sit down and write this without sounding like a grumpy 80-year-old woman who hasn't done any cuddling in the last twenty years, so I'll just go ahead and get it out of the way: MTV is total crap. I'm well aware that I do not fit its target demographic -- teen, can text message with one hand while the other hand enters Google searches for plagiarized term papers, wears underwear with "FEISTY" silk-screened across the crotch -- but just because I'm not the one it is catering to doesn't mean that I am not capable of appreciating it. I want to love it because it raised me like a doting adoptive parent, but now it is an old and distant convalescent relative who smells like his own urine and walks around with his hairy, pocked buttocks hanging out the back of his hospital gown.