As Fatty pointed out to me earlier today, Twitter is dead. The reason being his mom is now on Twitter. Just as we declared Facebook dead a couple of months ago when my parents both decided independently to join, presumably due to some serious and extremely coincidental key strokes since they still paw at the computer like a bunch of monkeys around a monolith. Like maybe my mom drank too much Chamomile while playing Minesweeper and dropped face-first onto the keyboard in some sort of Chai-induced narcolepsy and through some lucky facial twitches managed to sign up for a Facebook account. And now that Fatty’s mom is on Twitter we can go ahead and erect a little digital memorial for it and start searching for the next mom-free social networking site. But before we abandon Twitter entirely, allow us to marvel for a moment in one last celebrity Twitter-fight.

Trent Reznor, never one to pull punches (especially when it comes to other artists or his former record label) took a moment to comment on the latest record by one of his contemporaries, Chris Cornell. Now, you no doubt have noticed the utter lack of new Chris Cornell solo material here on KUFO. And the reasons for that are two-fold. First, with the exception of “Seasons” from the Singles soundtrack, Chris’ solo material seems to mostly be written as background music for Summer’s Eve commercials. Second, his newest record was produced by Timbaland and plays more like a Justin Timberlake album than what one would traditionally imagine to be Cornell’s wheelhouse. Now, I’m not saying it’s a bad record. But Trent Reznor is. He Twittered earlier today, “You know that feeling you get when somebody embarrasses themselves so badly YOU feel uncomfortable? Heard Chris Cornell’s record? Jesus.” Unfortunately I do know that feeling because I had it myself when I first heard Cornell’s latest material. It’s that instant back tension. Maybe you crouch a little like you’re trying to carefully poop a mouse. You grimace like your dad just swatted the back of your head. I had that. I pooped that little mouse. But I eased my pucker and allowed Chris Cornell his conceit and got over the fact that we will never hear the greatest screamer in rock shred his vocal chords Jesus Christ Pose-style again.

Trent, however, remains puckered having passed only a little mouse tail. And apparently Cornell’s army of soccer moms have lashed out at Trent because he Tweeted later, “Don’t shoot the messenger!” It would be nice to know that you’ll be remembered when you’re gone. To know that when you shuffle off this mortal coil all your friends and family will be utterly devastated without you, driven to distraction, totally unable to even function without your existence on the planet. What would suck, of course, is when you look down from you cloud to bathe in the lamentations of your loved ones only to hear them giggling. Worse yet, to hear them playing your songs with someone else, as if you never existed at all. In a fit of existential jealousy you peer over the edge of your cloud to discover that, not only is someone else playing your songs, but that person is far more famous than you ever were and that your loss, while tragic, will be quickly forgotten in sound of feet scrambling to get the other guy’s autograph. Unfortunately Ron Ashton’s cloud is about to be a very lonely place because the Stooges might be bringing in a Sex Pistol to replace him. Ashton died a couple of weeks ago of a heart attack and there was a period of mourning. But that mourning may soon be replaced with a period of rock and an interlude of ass-tearing and possibly an era of face-torching. That’s because Iggy and the rest of the Stooges are strongly considering the offer of Steve Jones to come play guitar in Ashton’s place. The band was set to go back out on tour when Ashton died, but those plans where ditched. Now they may be back on if the Stooges decide to bring in a replacement geriatric.

Well, if you were feeling at all guilty about illegally downloading Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” album… get a SPINE! Jesus, with the way they overcompressed that record they should be thankful for illegal downloading because people might chock the distorted high end up to a crappy upload and not to the fact that they kept mashing on the hard limiting button like an ADD kid trying to get a crosswalk signal. That record couldn’t have been more compressed if was accidentally left between the rim and seat of Michael Moore’s toilet. But if you are some such easily guilted Metallica fan, here’s something to assuage your remorse. Lars Ulrich has illegally downloaded “Death Magnetic” as well. He says that he and some friends recently decided to see what the hubub was with this downloading thing and tried it out for themselves. Lars says, “I was like, ‘Wow, this is how it works.’ I figured if there is anybody that has a right to download ‘Death Magnetic’ for free, it’s me. I sat there one night at my house with about six of my friends and a bottle of wine and thirty minutes later, I had ‘Death Magnetic’ in my computer. It was kind of bizarre.”

I don’t like it. Out of all the states that begin with O, Oregon has always been “the cool one.” We have a kick ass music scene, we have actors like Sam Elliot and Milo Whatshisname from Heroes living here. I even heard Johnny Depp has a house down near Ashland. We’ve got all those Mt. Dew-drinking extreme sports fans who ride rocket powered zip lines from the summit of Mt. Hood to a trampoline on the lava dome of St. Helens that launches them into a swimming pool full of sharks and tweakers with friggin’ laser beams where their friggin’ teeth used to be in Gresham. So I always felt that we had a pretty firm grasp on the Cool O State title, but all of a sudden Oklahoma is making me nervous. For years they seemed perfectly fine to be the O state that sexes up cattle and hates brown people. But now they’re making a play for our title. Now granted they have a lot of extreme sporting and dressing in too-tight jeans that show way too much man crack before they catch up to us, but I will say their opening salvo is pretty impressive. Oklahoma just made the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize” the state’s official state rock song. We don’t even have a state rock song, let alone one sung by the Flaming Lips. Residents of the state nominated 454 songs, which were narrowed down to 10 finalists, amongst which were Elvis Presley’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and The Call’s ‘Oklahoma’.

And finally, I told you how Spinal Tap is planning a tour this summer and apparently I was wrong. The initial reports I read suggested that the Tap would take to the road for the first time since the 90’s but as it turns out it will be some cover band made up of a bunch of hack comedians. There’s that one guy who played the Gitmo doctor who testified in A Few Good Men and Lenny from Lavern and Shirley and some voice actor who does Smithers on the Simpsons. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer. They’re the ones who will be going out on tour, not Tap. These three doof will be playing Tap’s music along some folk tunes from some fictional movie folk band. I don’t know what it’s all about. For some reason they’re calling it the “Unwigged & Unplugged” tour. What sucks is I don’t think Nigel, Derek or David will even make an appearance. The comedians pretending to be Spinal Tap tour will come to Portland’s Keller Auditorium April 19th with tickets going on sale Friday.