"Save A Kitten, Nuke A Whale?" What's up with kids these days? (Awesome Covers of Already Awesome Songs.)

I realized, today, that I use the word awesome unironically. I don't know when that began.

I used to, as a kid, use the word awesome because that was kind of the way people talked back then. I was a kid in the 80s, when kids were cooler than kids in the 90s or 00s were, and kids in the 80s, while not talking like "Kids in Movies And TV Shows In the 80s," talked pretty cool anyway. We didn't talk exactly like the kids in The Breakfast Club, or Valley Girl, but we took enough of their language and made it our own to be reasonably cool.

Or as reasonably cool as people can be wearing cuffed blue jeans and Docksiders without socks.

That's a look I miss. Seriously. I would like to wear cuffed pants and Docksiders without socks because I think it was a good look. It was better than the too-long, "bell bottom" jeans that Sweetie buys for me and the kids insist I wear. Sometimes, when I'm at home, alone, and left to my own devices, I go ahead and "cuff" my pants anyway, and then relax and feel all 80s -- or even better than the 80s, because while I've got cool 80s cuffed pants, I pair them with my blue Crocs.

Anyway, when I was a kid, I wore cuffed pants and Docksiders without socks and I said Awesome because that was how we talked back then. As I got older, I started not saying awesome because I was a grown-up, but then, I started saying it again, kind of in an ironic way, a way I attribute to two characters:

Mike, Phoebe's boyfriend on Friends, and Barney on How I Met Your Mother.

Mike said "awesome" only once that I can recall, but it was a singularly good moment, a moment when Phoebe had met Mike's parents and embarrassed herself over and over, including one moment when she began discussing their sex life with his Mom, after which Mike looked at her and said, quietly: "Awesome." I liked the way he said it, and tried to do that myself, throwing an awesome quietly at people where it was sarcastically appropriate.

Barney, of course, says awesome all the time, and as I watched more and more of How I Met Your Mother, I realized that more and more, I was saying awesome, too, mimicking him. (Which you'll have to forgive. I was short on heroes just then, with Brett Favre having retired.)

Which leads me to now, when I say things are awesome and I mean it, saying it without even thinking about it, using it in business conversations, which worries me, because it means that I'm constantly in danger of saying, in a final argument to a jury in a court case: Here are five awesome reasons to totally rule in favor of my client.

That all has almost nothing to do with the awesome cover of today's already awesome song. The already awesome song is "Blister In The Sun," which I've loved since I was a teenager (thereby providing the connection to that overly-long lead-in). Here's the Violent Femmes version:



And here's the Awesome Cover, by Nouvelle Vague:



And here's Awesome Cover number two: The Ukulele Version, by BobbThompson:



And here's Handsome Alvin's cover of that song:



And here's The Cliches:



That was a long intro, but I really like those kids. I'm going to make Mr F and Mr Bunches form their own band and be clever and likeable like that. Plus, that kid really shredded that guitar at the end. Awesome.