Why should you listen to me? How about this: I have a big fancy column in The Badger Herald, "Madison's First-But-Not-Only Independent Student Newspaper," and you're bored enough to read it while you're stuck in some packed lecture hall. Stuck because you inexplicably believe that attendance is mandatory despite the fact that the accomplished and tenured professors you are able to vaguely make out from the back of the auditorium are just rephrasing information that's already in the text books you paid $130 a piece for.

Here's an idea: just pay for the lecture or the book and, with the money you save, buy only the movies, books, video games, music and rare, out-of-print View-Master reels that I tell you to. If you have enough free time to spend a third of every day paying attention to Ph.D.s ignominiously reduced to the level of improvisational audio books, you should have a little left over to get into every piece of past, present and future pop culture that I tell you to.

I'm not going to tell you that "The Simpsons" is cool. You know that, and you know "Family Guy" is as good or better, and that "American Dad" is crappy by comparison but still viewable — especially the two-parter where the whole family goes to Afghanistan.

But did you watch "Clone High," the show about a school full of clones of famous people, for the barely-one-season it was on MTV, cancelled partly because MTV loves to cancel cartoons in the first season in the same way and for the same reason that you love to get the person whose name you can't remember out of your bed the next morning (The way being "as quickly as possible and without consideration for the needs of the subject," and the reason being "you/MTV drank half a bottle of tequila and suddenly ‘3-South’/that person was looking hotter than MTV/you could have ever imagined in those tight pants/that 11 p.m. time slot" — way to prevent all the cool kids from watching it who are out getting into legally questionable trouble that late on a weekend instead of sitting on their asses at home) and in part because people with no sense of humor in India objected to the portrayal of Gandhi's adolescent clone as a brain-dead party animal?

The answer is: you didn't watch it. And in answer to your follow-up question to me is: yes, that is a run-on sentence with an unnecessary parenthetical in it, but the sheer size of it is beautiful. Look forward to more of the same.

And yeah, you know Rilo Kiley is a pretty alright band that can switch between a close approximation to rocking and being hummable, quietly pleasing with effortless ease. But did you know the lead singer is the chick that played the pre-adolescent love interest of Fred Savage in "The Wizard”? Did you even see “The Wizard”? Where were you in the '80s? Did your weirdly-religious-but-well-meaning mom not let you play Nintendo or something? It was the best movie ever made about a mute kindergarten-aged video game savant who travels across America's great open highways and learns the meaning of courage and love when he gets the Warp Whistle in the first Koopa fortress of "Super Mario Brothers 3" using the raccoon-suit trick.

I would explain the raccoon-suit trick to you, but unfortunately the only people I consider worth talking to are the ones who already know where the first Warp Whistle is and know that you use it to get to 4-1, the first level of Giant Land. If you don't know that and you see me at a party, around campus or face down in a plate of spicy half-and-half Pel'meni (because I mistakenly believe it rejuvenates my skin and reduces my chances of developing cancer) don't even look at me or I'll punch you so hard your grandmother will get pregnant. No offense meant.

Plus, the dude who does semi-unlistenable male vocals occasionally for Rilo Kiley was the little skinny bully you don't even remember from "Boy Meets World" because he wasn't important enough to rate his own plotlines. That show starred Ben Savage, which means that half of the band is one-degree removed from the Savage brothers. For this eerie link and several other reasons, "Boy Meets World" was the best live-action show Disney ever produced. Likewise Ducktales was the best cartoon because Carl Barks, who invented Scrooge McDuck in the late '40s, was a genius whose storytelling and charmingly eccentric characters were too well crafted to be watered down by the translation to Saturday-morning television, whereas "Bonkers" the cartoon cop was a mentally handicappable bobcat who made funny noises when injured.

And if you disagree with any of that, you can take it up with me next time when I'll tell you what comic books are worth reading even though you think comic books are for people too dumb for real books and too ugly to go out in public and get drunk with everybody else who's too dumb for real books. In fact, come to think of it, there are a lot of things in life that you seem to have ignored because of your narrow-minded view of everything in general and the stuff I think is cool in particular.

Thank god you've got me to fix that. You can thank me later — if you remember in which world and level Mario gets the magic Goomba Shoe. Otherwise just talking to you will make me feel the way I feel when the TV asks me to spend a dime a year to save a starving child and I know if that kid wasn't so lazy, he could just shine the shoes of the landed gentry for nickels.

Well, here's my promise to you: learn a little respect for the Goomba Shoe and maybe something else almost as good that I yell about once every two weeks, and I will do whatever "Save the Children" tells me to do to keep a starving kid alive for one entire year. You hear that, Madison? I'm putting my money where my mouth is: more specifically, in some Ethiopian munchkin's mouth. Hell, I'll even put his picture on here so you can all adopt him or her with me, just as you'll be adopting cartoonist Ariel Schrag, musician Matt Mahaffey and the craziest computer game Europe ever made that I bothered to play, all in the months to come.

How will you prove you're paying some attention to me and the Ethiopian I'm holding hostage with my tight-fistedness? Send me pictures of yourself with any of the products I tell you are awesome and we will work together to prove they are awesome by saving a starving child's life. And why an Ethiopian? Not because I'm a racist, but because they are the most popular nationality of starving child since the famously edible Irish.

Ben Freund thinks he knows what's what, but he's not really such a bad guy. Tell him what rules and sucks at [email protected], and he will politely disagree with you. You suckhole.