ENTERTAINMENT DROPPINGS: New Years 2007 Battle Of The Blands

What do two socially challenged people with nowhere else to go do for New Year's Eve? Well, if you're John Eats and Anonymous A you get out of the hustle-bustle of the city and venture off to Suburbia!, where you find a hotel in the middle of friggin nowhere for (comparatively) dirt cheap. Then you spend the day sitting in your room, eating your own snacks, playing your brand-spanking new Nintendo DS Lites and watching terrible movies -- all while doing your best to avoid everyone else in the hotel. And if anyone happens to get close enough so they can say "Happy New Year!" to you, make sure you reply "You too."

And so it was that at the pivotal moment (well, actually 11pm because of the lack of time-delay on the broadcasts) I found myself wildly snapping cameraphone pictures of the raucous goings-on in Times Square...off the 42" plasma screen HD TV in our room. So check it, beeyatches: A/V nerd bling in da hizz-ouse!!

Yes, we had forty two crystal-clear inches of front row seat for the DALY VS. SEACREST NEW YEAR'S ROCKINEST EVE SMACKDOWN, the media event of the last twenty four hours! So which of them most deserved to emerge from the long, speech-impedimented shadow of Dick Clark? Who came out on top?


Was it Ryan Seacrest, Dick's One True Heir Apparent on Clark's own ABC show (pictured above yucking it up with Special Guest Star Xtina™ Aguilera who refused to go to first base with Ryan when the Midnight Hour came a-calling, instead offering him nothing more than a frosty peck on the cheek)?


Or was it Carson Daly, with his svelte Dick Clark Lite™ look (it's amazing what some personal grooming and frontal lighting will do for his perpetual Hitler moustache-like undernose shadow) on NBC (pictured above with his bland female cohosts whose names I don't care to remember)?

Or was it really You, the American Viewing Public, who ultimately won in the end?

It's hard to say really, since both of them were nigh-on unwatchable. Nothing aids my narcolepsy more than whitebread cardboard-cutout hosts doing absolutely all they can to suck whatever life there might have been out of the alcohol-free revelry of New York's most visible New Year Borefest. But Carson Daly did awkwardly read pre-scripted comments at least twice celebrating how "communication and entertainment changed in 2006" -- basically, he talked about YouTube the way people used to talk about fax machines. So I think he wins on a technicality for being rock stupid.

Well, we're off to get our complimentary continental breakfast.

You too.