fall-durr-all and fiddle-dee-dee

sunday night, off and on, i was watching the american music awards on abc when nbc was showing commercials during the colts-chargers game.

now a lot of the music they played isn't to my taste. i thought: it's pop for today's kids. let them listen to whatever they want; i'm not going to harsh on it.

but -- and there's always a but --

many of the acts had a lot of big lights flashing and moving around. it reminded me of rock and roll groups that have big light shows -- like, for two examples, motley crue and nickleback.

such light shows don't impress me. they distracts from the quality of the music.

then this thought came to me: maybe those light shows are substitutes for and masks overs the quality of the music. and it wasn't all that good.

then i thought of the book eats, shoots, and leaves by lynne truss, which was a strong criticism of the state of punctuation these days.

i picked up the book in a bookstore and glanced through it. i remember the sentences for which she tried to improve their punctuation. many of them were what's called complex sentences -- overly complex sentences. it would've been better if most of those sentences had just been rewritten.

or where those sentences written that way because the author wanted to impress the reader? whatever the intent, they didn't impress me.

big light shows at concerts and overtly complex sentences are signs of pretentiousness. as an elder relative, now gone, once said: "that's a case of fall-durr-all and fiddle-dee-dee."

the older i get, the more i agree.